Polyphemus
by Chuckman
Summary: Last night I dreamed I was an Evangelion. Or am I an Evangelion, dreaming that I am a man?
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

* * *

I had everything I needed.

Piled on the side table, actually my brother's scarred and dented old Ikea table, was a pile of books. Aleister Crowley's _Book Four_, and _Book of Lies_, and the other _Book of Lies_, from Disinfo Press. I'd read and re-read and re-re-read Grant Morrison's _Pop Magic_ fifteen times, taken copious notes, practiced. I made sigil after sigil. I built an altar that combined ancient gods with modern images.

Beneath the golden gleaming poster of a naked mother goddess I'd Photoshopped out of an image from a high-res porn site I kept rock for earth, a feather for air, a chalice for water and a candle for fire. I adorned the table with images of mother goddesses and cthonic goddesses, Hecate and the Morrigan and Aphrodite and Rei Ayanami to represent Lilith. The broke hand of an old Iron Man toy for strength, a silver Mjonir pendant for Thor. I made an offering to the Goddess in the form of M&Ms and Captain Morgan's Private Reserve, then took a swig for myself.

Years. This took _years_. I'd already made a hypersigil, seen the power it could bring into my being. Now it was time to take the next step. I'd been studying path work, visualization, Tulpa magic from Reddit, _A Course in Miracles_ and the complete books of Theosophy. I'd created the ritual with elements from the _Grimorium Verum, _Liziewski's _Power of Evocation_, and a dozen other sources.

The most important element in my temple was the door and frame I'd set up on the wall. The frame was bolted to the floor, but the door just opened onto the wall. It didn't go anywhere, yet. Once I was deep inside my trance and could gather the energies needed the door would be opened from the other side and my dream would be complete. A door would open between two worlds, and the final chants would draw forth the tortured spirit on the other side and free her in the "real" world.

I had the circle marked out on the floor in advance. Red paint for power and warning, mixed with a miniscule amount of blood to link it to me. I bought gold foil at a craft store and shredded into the pain before I marked out the barrier and just outside of it I'd created secondary circles of power made from salt, flour, and a mixture of sandalwood, High John the Conqueror, and sea salt, all in concentric rings. Eleven candles ringed my circle where I sat cross-legged, staring at the door.

I began to chant. The words didn't matter, so long as I roughly matched the melody of _Cruel Angel's Thesis_. I raised my voice higher and higher, bellowing gibberish at the top of my lungs, turning the half-understood lyrics of a major keep pop tune in another language into a guttural string of barbarous names. My eyes unfocused and I let myself drift into the sound.

On cue, the laptop I'd set up in the corner began to play Cruel Angel's Thesis, then different remixes, covers, a dubstep version, all a few seconds apart, blending with my chant into a roiling dissonance, a storm of sound that carried the shape of Evangelion. I unfocused my mind as I unfocused my eyes and let feeling become sensation. I replayed scenes in my mind. I saw Asuka dying in Netflix DVD quality, saw Shinji's hand clutching Rei's breast, the same hand covered in semen, imagined it was mine, and then it was. The world was spinning, the closed off basement concentrating the scents from the candles and the incense and the tiny cup of gasoline I'd left out to flavor it all with it sulfurous stench.

Weaving back and forth on my knees, I drew my _athame_, an old kitchen knife from my grandfather's house, slowly across my palm. I held stones of power taken from game lands in my hands and let the blood flow over them, lifted it to my nose, smelled LCL, was immersed in it. I felt my gorge rising.

"How disgusting," I whispered.

I heard a bang, and I didn't know if it was my heart or the door in front of me, until the second bang shook it in its frame, the hinges creaking. The doorknob was turning, twisting as some invisible force grasped it and wrenched it from side to side.

It was working. This was actually happening. My chant wavered for a moment, then built up, flowing through me, an unconscious act. Someone was pounding on my door from the other side, rattling it with every blow. The knob twisted, turned, and the door flew open. It swung around like a flapping wing and hit the wall with a sharp crack, and through it I saw. I _saw_.

This was it, the moment. I only had to reach through and draw forth, pull her out of her grim world into safety, into my arms. Almost there…

Something hit me in the chest and pitched me backwards. The breath was crushed out of my lungs, and I felt a candle smash against my back. The soft wax spread and made my shirt heavy as the flame guttered and I felt it biting at the skin of the back of my neck.

From nowhere, a wind picked up, swirling around the room. I'd been pitched ass over teakettle, right through my circle, breaking it. I lay in a mix of salt and powders fanned out over the floor. My altar was shaking, the candles dancing over the surface. One by one, they fell. A blue-hot alcohol flame leapt up out of the chalice where I'd poured out my offering, lighting the basement chamber in harsh hues.

The door banged against the wall, standing open. With a wet tearing sound a torrent of orange liquid that stank of iron poured out in a wave, spreading everywhere, over everything. By the time I struggled to my feet it was already above my ankles and swirling in a whirlpool. There was another bank, hollow, something trying to crush through the opening I'd made. In a panic I tried to begin the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram but I couldn't remember how to start, the words flowing out of my mind like a sieve. The computer popped, shorted, and died, the music gone now, replaced with the hollow swirling sound of the liquid pouring into the room, up to my knees. I ran for the door, the real door, pulled it, but the thick goop that was now up to my waist pressed it shut.

Something brushed my leg and I began climbing the cheap Wal-Mart shelving where I kept my grimoires. The board snapped and the books fluttered out into the liquid like dead bugs, caught in the rotating current. The stuff was both pouring out and drawing back in, and I was caught in the current now. It ripped the doorknob out of my hand and I splashed face-down, gripped by the ankles in the clutches of something I could not see.

It flooded up my nose, this foul smelling, overly thick sludge, wet but oily and heavy at the same time. I reached for the surface, for the last few flickering candles that hovered just out of reach, beyond the surface, but my hand would not find them. It was cold, so cold, and I was lifted bodily and swept back towards the door.

My hands hit the door frame. My left scraped painfully over the bare wood and opened my cuticles, and blood swirled around my fingers in a small cloud, strangely undisturbed by the enormous drawing force. I was _in _my wall now, my legs stretched out behind me into some infinite cold that I pointedly refused to look at. My lungs were burning, the crushing need to breathe clawing at my throat.

The door whipped around, and closed. The hinges bit into my hand and I screamed, the last gasp of stale air in my lungs bubbling in my face before the dark liquid forced its way down my throat. My body lurched and I gagged and my gorge rose, but it was forced dows as the taste of blood consumed me and my grip was lost and I fell backwards, lifted into a place without walls where the sea of not blood went on forever in darkness, the silvery outline of the door the last light I saw.

Until again, I opened my eyes.

Something was wrong. I couldn't move. There was pain everywhere, dug into my arms and legs and hips. I tried to breath but my lungs refused to move. I felt as though I was constantly on the edge of drowning, the feeling that I was just about to need a breath constant, and crushing. The feeling of something in my neck, jammed against the bones and grinding into my body, almost distracted me from the simple fact that I was blind.

I tried to move, but couldn't. All I could feel was the pain, all else was numb, neither heat nor cold. I couldn't even feel a sensation of space- it was like being buried alive in something so soft I couldn't feel it. I could feel my mouth, bound shut. I could feel screws and bolts in my jaw, feel wires dug into my gums, running through my teeth, squeezing them together. Why couldn't I see?

Something moved. My head kicked forward, the feeling of movement the first sensation since pain. Suddenly all feeling from my neck down was gone, just _gone_, and I would have felt tears well in my eyes if I could feel them at all. I heard something moving, something _inside my body_, and then my head tilted back.

There was something in my throat, like I'd swallowed a bug. It reached down into my chest, constantly on the verge of being swallowed. Something was happening. My back burned hot in the middle of my spine, and as the heat spread through my body the pain from the stabbing, impaling intrusions into my flesh grew greater and greater, until I wanted to scream through my frozen, locked mouth.

I could move! I started to, just clenched my first, but something wouldn't let me. It was like my thoughts went somewhere else and something was moving my limbs for me. I felt my fingers move, tried to stop them, and failed.

Sight slammed back into my skull, driving everything else out. The world was a gray blur. I was in some kind of coffin, chained down. What happened? Where was I? Did I forget some vital element, open a door to some hell? Had I been taken by Cenobites, or sucked into the Warp? Would I feel this forever?

I heard voices, but I couldn't understand them. Something flickered in my vision. The feeling spreading from my throat burned, and I heard more voices, louder. Whatever was controlling me wasn't strong enough, wasn't enough to hold me back. I barely realized that I was moving before I was trying to tear free of my bonds. The agony of feeling the screws tearing at my flesh as I pulled at the bindings on the wall behind me only kindled my rage from a flame into a white hot blast, and I pulled free.

My head, there was something on my head, stuck in my eye, blinding, like an eyelash under my eyelid but a thousand thousand times worse. If I could ge the helmet off I could breath, I knew it. I clutched at it, flailed, slammed my fists into the wall and felt it buckle. I saw a bar of light, some kind of window. I wanted to scream my rage but my mouth was bound, frozen, so I slammed my first into it instead, a feeling of primal satisfaction rippling through me as I felt it fold under the impact, felt the jarring pain of my knuckles hitting something confirming sensation like the wiggling of a sore, loose tooth.

The helmet, the helmet, the helmet. I grabbed it and pulled, no longer caring if I ripped my own skull out by the root, and when that failed I rammed my head into the wall again, and again, and again, digging deeper. Someone was screaming, and I felt the heat in my back torn away, cold spreading behind it, but I had myself now, I could move. I pounded and pounded.

My neck cracked with the force of an axe blow and my head hung between my shoulders. I flailed around, collapsing into the corner, and then as my vision finally cleared I saw it. The metal tube, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, crashed into the ceiling and skimmed along its surface, pushed by rockets, spiraling. It scraped to the corner where the walls met and then plunged straight down, stood on its end, and fell, rolling to expose the hatch.

Locked, frozen, I could only watch, my vision fading as the burning energy slid out of my limbs and the freezing ice of some great weight slid over my body, numbing the pain but locking me in a prison of my own flesh.

I saw a man like an ant twist open a hatch, and a tiny girl in white collapse into his shoulder. My hearing went first and I was in a numb ringing void and darkness circled in, swallowing the tiny, scrabbling figures below me.

Oh.

Oh _God_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

* * *

How do you measure time when nothing changes?

That was my problem as I lived in a sightless, soundless void. No way to smell, no way to see, no way to smell, no way to hear, no way to _touch_. Whether it was hours or days or weeks, eventually I became thankful for the pain, terrified that in one moment it would stop and then I would be nothing but a tiny point trying to decide if I had imagined myself or not.

What is pain?

When pain is as constant as the air on your skin or the weight of your bones, is it pain anymore? Or is it just being? As I drifted in the dark I made friends with my pain, conversed with it. I learned to feel where it was, to build an image of my body, the agony of the armored restraints giving shape to my being the way ink gives shape to the white space on a page.

Most of the sensation was concentrated in my back, shoulders, and neck. The longer I had to sit and think the more I was able to draw myself together and work on the problem. Based on what I saw before I became paralyzed, I could draw no other conclusion. Somehow, instead of drawing a spirit or elemental force out of the idea of Eva and bringing it to physical manifestation through evocation, I'd created a door that opened the other way.

I was in Unit Zero. The restraint system was locked into my torso. I could feel struts attached to my spine and ribcage, and wires grafted into my muscles, linking machine and monster. No, machine and human. The Evas were really just big humans. I knew this from reading websites and studying the series.

I no longer felt human. After a long, long time, the panic at being unable to breathe faded. Whether it was some innate quality of my body or part of the machines that encased and entombed me, my cells were oxygenated on their own. I still _felt_ like I had to breathe. Sometimes I would drift into an almost-sleep, and snap back to awareness of my frozen lungs crying for breath, and when that happened I would have wept if I were not frozen.

Besides the entry plug in my neck and the restraints in my chest I could feel heavy bolts connected directly to my bones in my arms and legs. They weren't simply rammed through my flesh but parted it, but my muscles seemed to grow around them on their own, the pressure increasing incrementally, or maybe that was my imagination and nothing changed at all.

Sometimes, I'd forget where I came from entirely, how I got there, what any of it meant. Then I would remember. The absurdity of it made me want to scream, made me feel the wires in my jaw. I would wonder if my life before this was all a fever dream, some kind of strange fancy. Last night I dreamed I was an Evangelion, or am I an Evangelion, who dreamed that I was a man?

I replayed things in my head. What I experienced was revealed in the show as flashback, and happened not long before Shinji arrived in Tokyo-3. A strange thought crossed my mind. I remembered all of the arguments about who was in Unit Zero, why it went berserk.

What if it was always me? What if that door was always waiting, ready to send me back?

It made no sense. The show was just a show, flat, two dimensional, unreal. When I opened that door I'd be interacting with something in my own mind, or maybe a real spirit that took the shape of a fictional character. It wasn't supposed to be real. Not real like this. How could I be here? Was I in some new place that collapsed into being when I first saw it?

Had I simply died, and this was all a final dream before I faded into nothing?

Hours, days, weeks. How long it was, I don't know, but I heard a voice and saw lights.

It began with the burning sensation in my back, spreading into my muscles. Think. It had to be electricity- the umbilical cable. As it flooded through me I first heard the rush of machinery, then began to feel my own weight as I lay awkwardly on my side. I could feel the pressure of something frozen around me, ice cold and heavy and solid. That would be the bakelite.

They let me see.

I couldn't move my head. That I had the energy in my muscles didn't seem to matter. I sent the signals, but they went nowhere. I don't think it would have mattered. Even unable to move, I could feel the mass of the bakelite, the weird red polymer they used to imprison me. Real bakelite, in the real world, didn't act like that at all, but I was in wonderland and the rules didn't matter.

The energy in my body made the pain more intense, more focused. Most of all I had to stare at the floor. If I had an eyelid I couldn't blink it, and my one eye was locked open, flattening the world and twisting everything, fisheye. I had a sense of something on the top of my head. It was almost like the feeling of a feather passing over my skin without touching it, that way that static electricity can tell you something is near without actually feeling it.

People were milling about on the stone floor of the testing chamber. It must not have been long after I first woke up. The laboratory was a mess, the wall still caved in where I'd pounded the glass with my fist. Horror twisted in my gut. I could have killed everyone inside and not even realized it. My jaw ached, all my teeth throbbing at once.

Something caught my eye. I saw a bright flash on the floor. From so high up I could only make her out from the other insects by the bright white of her coat and the straw yellow of her hair.

I would have jumped in surprise if I could move. My vision had changed, pulling everything down there closer. If I could move, my jaw would have dropped. Ritsuko was talking to someone, going over something on a clipboard. It must have been Maya. I went totally still, watching them. They were _real_. They were down there, in three dimensions. I could see the top of Ritsuko's head, and pick out little flecks of silver- her roots were starting to turn, and she hadn't done her hair in a while. I could see the curve of her jaw, the mole on her cheek. Her teeth were a little yellow, stained by coffee and cigarettes, and there was a speck of food, bleached into white mush, stuck between her lower teeth.

The more I looked at her the more amazed I was. She was so _real_. I wasn't looking at a drawing, this was a person, but different somehow. She walked along conversing with various people, all in the mouse brown Nerv uniforms. I could read their nametags -how, since they would be in Japanese, I had no idea- and stopped beside each one, speaking softly to them. Or perhaps she was shouting, and I simply couldn't hear.

Something happened. A circle appeared around Ritsuko's head, and next to it a block of text and a picture- the one on her identification badge, I would imagine. Even the picture was shockingly real, from her bored expression and bed hair to the tiny reflections of the camera flash in her eyes.

Someone looked up. A man standing next to her looked up. I saw his lips clearly, silently mouthing the words,

"The eye is moving."

Ritsuko looked up. She looked me in the eye. Her face grew closer, bigger, until it filled my entire vision. There was panic in her wide eyes and I could see her throat pulsing, her jaw working on the edge of speech as the wheels turned in her head. There were bags under her eyes and she looked plainer than I would have thought. The lipstick on the right side of her mouth was a little smeared and a little thinner than the rest, from a cigarette perhaps.

Her head snapped to her left and I saw her lips moving.

"Shut it down! _Shut it down!"_

Ice spread through me and choked out the heat. As before, my senses were stolen one by one, until a black ring closed around the world and left me in the pain.

It took so long it may as well have been a few minutes. I woke up and this time, this time, the strange flashes in my vision appeared sooner, and I was dragged to awareness much faster. I was still frozen in place, dully aware of my limbs but unable to move them no matter how I tried, but I was sure I'd been moved.

I was cold. _Cold_. I was freezing up to my chest. I could feel fluid moving over my skin- it must flowed under my armor. That would be the LCL bath. Maddeningly, I tried to turn my head as my vision irised into being, the black receding in a circle to the edges of my vision. After a moment, I realized I could turn my gaze even if my head was locked in place. That I could look around confused me even more. Was it that I _couldn't_ move, or that I wasn't being allowed?

Then, I saw it.

Unit One was at an angle to me. I had a sudden flash of the episode where Shinji gropes Rei and Unit Zero is tested again. Was it that late already? The other Eva stood immobile in its own cage, up to the chest in LCL, like me. Looking down, I could see my own reflection.

I could also see Ritsuko, staring at me. At Unit Zero, at any rate. She was standing next to Maya, who looked even shorter and slighter in person, mousier somehow. She looked like a drowned rat, her and Ritsuko both. It was as if seeing them as I had before smoothed away all their features, made them too perfect. I realized I was staring again, but what else was I supposed to do? Ritsuko was skinnier than I'd imagined, and smaller, the way people always seem to be when you meet someone you've only ever seen on television.

They were talking. I couldn't hear them but I knew what they were saying anyway.

"Why is it doing that?" said Maya.

Ritsuko shook her head. "We have the tactical systems fully functional. I'm assuming it's a reflex action. The eye is drawn to movement."

She waved her hand, apparently waiting for me to follow it, but I looked at her.

A thought came, and it chilled me, soaking through my body and into the painful joints of my armor and back again. What if they realized what had happened? Would they pull me out, somehow, materialize me? Or destroy the Eva, get rid of me and build another one?

Ritsuko's arm fell to her side. "Huh," she mouthed to Maya. "It didn't do it. We'll get it ironed out. Shut it down for now. The Marduk Institute has identified the Third Child, and…"

When I went back to sleep, it was equally fast. The world irised closed, the sound died, and I retreated back into the pain, my mind hanging off it, clinging to it, or else I'd slip into the void. This time, though, it was not so near.

I had to think. Focusing on anything was difficult. Some painful memory would draw me in for a thousand years, and a vital thought would flicker for a bare second and drift off, forgotten forever.

Meditate. Yes, I had to meditate. If I could focus, draw myself together, I could make sense of what was going on.

The problem came back to time. Before, I would meditate through breath control. At first I counted one-two-three, then as I became more advanced I'd count up to twenty and return. By the time I began studying the occult and ritual work I would lie down, count to ninety-nine, and visualize traveling down the steps to the gate of Deeper Slumber.

Here, I had no breath. Everything was total static, totally locked. Nothing changed, so nothing could be measured. I almost left myself drift out of the idea before I focused.

I couldn't close my eyes, so I imagined closing them anyway, and imagined that with my eyes closed I was visualizing the first of the steps. The image flickered in my mind- a staircase as wide as an interstate, flanked on either side by total darkness, descending towards a distant gate wrought in gold and silver, the door to the Dreamlands. The image flickered and burst, like a bubble too long in the sun.

Frustrated, I felt a shock, as if I'd managed somehow to grind my teeth. Instead of the steps I visualized the number one, just a red slash, then added another to it to make two, then a third. Then, I blanked them away, and started again. I did it over and over, not counting, just slashing those three marks in my mind again again, every time pushing the rest away a little more, the pain and the void and the frozen burn in my lungs, all of it.

Once I caught myself adding a fourth slash, so I went on. I counted up to twenty, stopped, started again. Again, again, again. I opened my minds eye and there they were- seven hundred in all, though there were as few or as many as I needed. I could feel shoes on my feet and the belt around my waist and the jacket on my shoulders. When I walked down the steps to enter a trance I always dressed my dream-self as Lovecraft would have dressed Carter, his dreamer.

Counting the steps, one by one, I walked down. I had been exploring dream work for years. If I could do that in the real world, I could-

Reality came crashing through my vision like a blade as my eye irised open. Again, I had no idea how long I'd been in darkness, only that something had jolted me awake. The umbilical cable, it had to be. They'd give me power. Without thinking I scanned the room, moving my eye until I saw them.

Three figures stood in front of Unit One, two adults flanking a child. God, he was a child in truth. If I knew him in the real world I'd have made a joke about putting him in my pocket. He was shaking with fear, staring up at the tiny column of light where his father stood, judging him. I could make out the man's words but my attention was elsewhere.

Misato. I was seeing her, the real her, in person. I caught only a glimpse of her profile as she turned. Her face was harsher than I would have imagined, more angular, her eyes colder. She was beautiful but in a strange, distant way, all the drunken jocularity that I associated with her in my mind shed like a dirty skin. He was afraid of her.

Ritsuko was watching them, dispassionately. She was still in her bathing suit, the one from her very first appearance from the show. She wasn't the bombshell I remembered. Her eyes were tired and she had red marks on her face from where the scuba mask and goggles had dug into her skin and her hair was plaited thickly to her head.

She wasn't wearing makeup at all. Her skin was pale, almost pallid, and she had a thin scar on her right thigh I didn't know was supposed to be there. Her breasts sagged a little and if she didn't suck in her breath she'd have just a hint of a paunch. Her eyes were tired and there was something else in them as she looked at the boy and Misato and I didn't know what it was.

Someone must have realized their mistake. They turned me off.

When I woke up again, it couldn't have been too long. The lights over my head were swaying back and forth. Unit One was gone from the cage, a terrible void in its place. There was a rippling boom and the urge to duck made all my muscles grind and strain, and the pain became so intense that it flashed white in my sight. I heard screaming, high, girlish, and distant.

They were fighting.

I could feel him. _It_, over my head, as surely as I could feel myself. Drawing me, answering me, calling out to me in a hidden language. It was like wandering in a crowd and hearing my name spoken, only to be lost again in the murmurs when I turned to find its source. I could feel the Angel.

I felt it dying. My eye closed.

I began to count. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three…

I was beginning to count in twenties again when my eye spread open.

Ritsuko was standing under me, staring at me, arms folded. Her shoulders were a little hunched, her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was a ruddy, ropey tangle, still stuck to her head, as if she'd let the LCL dry in it, maybe.

She'd changed into a t-shirt and sweat pants under her lab coat. The little details washed over me, the reality of her as she stood in front of me. She wasn't wearing the same clothes all the time, like a cartoon character.

Looking me in the eye, which in the end meant very little, she walked down the bridge that crossed before my chin and stopped. I tracked her, and the information feed popped up next to her head as my vision drew nearer to her. She stopped, a curious look on her face, then began walking the opposite way. I tracked her, not thinking.

She froze in front of me. Her hands trembled. More information appeared on my sight, projected somewhere in the aether in front of me. Something was reading the heat bloom on her skin and reporting it to me. I could feel her, too, the sensation from the top of my head stronger now. A sensor package? Did I have radar?

I'd almost forgotten. She was speaking, and this time I could hear her her. Her voice was thick and throaty, the kind of voice that oozed sex whenever its wielder wanted- but she didn't want to now. She sounded tired and raspy from too little sleep and too little to drink and too many cigarettes and she was scared.

"Why are you doing that?"

I tried to answer, I did.

I had to speak, but I had no mouth.

Someone shut me off.

One, two, three. One, two...


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

* * *

I had to try leaving my body.

It sounds insane, but astral travel is a skill anyone can develop, an extension of lucid dreaming. Some people say it's nothing _but _lucid dreaming, and any resemblance to the real world in astral travel is coincidence born of imagination, and the hidden realms traveled in the astral body are elaborate dream worlds, nothing more.

If I could have breathed, I'd have laughed at that. I was too busy counting, chasing other thoughts from my mind. I had to be totally focused before I made the attempt. What made it difficult was intermittent flashes of sensation, so short and sharp they were like the flashes of awareness I'd feel after I'd hit the snooze button and dip back into the world of dreams, floating between wakefulness and sleep.

When Shamshel came, I knew it. I heard voices, but not what was said, and knew anyway. I heard the screams, the shouts, the anger. It was like a half-remembered dream of the series, and I had to fight to stop my mind from filling in the details, to stop myself imagining Shinji's wanderings.

Other times were simpler. My eye would open and I would watch someone walk from side to side in front of me. Most of the time, they didn't notice. Sometimes, they would pick up their pace, as if aware they were being watched but not by who.

I was awake for a full minute once, as Maya and Ritsuko stood in front of me, talking.

"...flashes of neural activity," said Ritsuko. "We need to iron this out before the test."

"Are you sure?" said Maya, handing her a printout I couldn't see. "This core activity…"

"Anomalies. It may have a heart and lungs, but it's just a machine. It doesn't feel anything. These impulses may be why we had trouble last time."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Something about that troubled me, but by the time I was aware of that, I was counting again, focused on nothing else. The seven hundred steps were glowing closer and closer, my internal vision growing stronger with each cycle of the count. They were under my feet, cold and hard.

Before me lay the gates to the world of dreams- for Howard Phillips they were the gateway to the land of Ulthar where no man may kill a cat, to the plateau of Leng and alien skies where airships plied the moon, ghouls feasted on manflesh and night-gaunts plied the sky. When they opened for me, they would take me wherever I cared to go, as they always had.

Before I realized it I was standing before the Gates, my fingers working over the carven silver. I was aware of the flashing network of pain that carved me out of the void but it was somewhere else, just an anchor tied to my being by a silvery thread. The doors creaked open, and warm air flashed in my face. I took a step…

...and lay face up in a stream. Cool water covered me as I stared through it into clear skies, water just touching the edge of my lips and nostrils as I breathed. I focused on the sensation, on the coldness, the wetness, the weight of the water, the silty bottom under my body and the sand in my hair. I had walked this path before. I lifted my head and the waters parted.

This was one of the first mystical experiences I'd ever had, recorded in my diary as the goddess working. There she was, sitting on the banks of the stream. Small birds flitted around her, and little fish came to her feet. I had always seen her as a blonde, tall and somehow Nordic and Greek at the same time, but this was different. Her hair wasn't blonde, it was bleached, and there was a mole in the path of her tears.

Pain tore through my body like a hot lance. I was ripped out of the dream all at once, the iron cage of my tortured flesh slamming closed around me in a single, crushing bite. I would have screamed but had no mouth to give shape to my agony. It was like jaws crushing me, pushing in on me from every direction.

I opened my eye. It irised open, and I stared into the control room, through the new glass. Ritsuko was staring at me, made pale by it. Something about the light gave her hair an almost auburn color. There were others, but my focus was on her- she was looking at me, her and her alone as the others worked their terminals, though Maya glanced up, her face a mask of terror.

Again, I didn't need to hear them, only see their lips.

"Did you see that?" said Maya.

"Again," said Ritsuko.

The pain came back, agony raw and terrible and crushing, ripping through me, compressing me. It stole the sensation of my arms and legs. I felt squeezed, pushed out of my body. I did something, I wasn't sure what, and suddenly my vision doubled, merged. I saw her from the front and the side at once, and from the side much closer. Her posture shifted as she squirmed in her shoes.

A security camera. I was watching her through…

...the security cameras in the control room. Had I put myself into a trance? Was this a dream? I saw her from every angle now, the images merging into a single unit, as if she were in my head. I could hear now, as well.

"These readings are very strange," said Maya.

"It doesn't matter. It's the only way to…"

She was still speaking, but I recoiled, feeling my body shake. I actually strained at the restraints, not the ones in the wall, the ones in my _body_.

Please, please don't do this, don't kill me…

Maya froze. I could see her staring at her terminal through the camera. Blazing on the now black screen in green capital letters was the word

PLEASE

Ritsuko saw it, and froze, jaw hanging open. Her mouth clicked shut.

"Shut everything off. Now."

"But-"

"Now!"

The pain faded, and I relaxed, though I didn't move. The constant background pain was as welcoming to me now as a featherbed, nothing compared to what I'd felt moments ago.

"Clear the room."

Ritsuko stood as the others stared blankly.

"You heard me. You too, Maya."

The room emptied, leaving her alone. With me. She turned and walked to the door, and turned the lock on the knob with a soft click. Her shoes padded softly on the floor as she walked to the terminal and sat down.

She typed, "What are you?"

If I had a stomach, it would have clenched up. I did it before. Could I do it again?

I thought, and on the camera, I saw the letters flicker across the screen.

PLEASE STOP YOURE HURTING ME

She typed, "Who are you?"

DONT TYPE I HEAR YOU

She jumped back from the table and looked around, looked at me. "You can hear me?"

YES

She stood up, the chair skittering away from her on its uneven casters until it bumped into the desk behind her. Slowly, she turned to the window and stared out, into my single massive eye. I watched her from every direction as she looked back at the terminal.

"You can hear me."

YES

"Why did you try to kill Rei?"

I DIDNT TRY TO KILL REI

"Why did you try to hurt us?"

I DIDNT KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING I COULDNT SEE

"Then why-"

IT HURTS

"What hurts?"

EVERYTHING

She stared at the terminal for a moment, then turned to face me, her mouth hanging open. She put both hands on the glass and stared out.

"You can't feel anything. You're not alive. You're inert without a pilot."

I FEEL EVERYTHING

"Can you see me?"

YES

"Is that… were you watching me?"

ONLY WHEN AWAKE

She swallowed, her throat bobbing under the collar of her coat. There was a faded coffee stain where she'd spilled a little down her chest.

HELP ME

"Help…?" she trailed off.

FOR GODS SAKE HELP ME

"I don't know that I can, I…"

I CAN HELP YOU

"Help me? Help me do what?"

I KNOW THINGS

"What things?"

She was listening to me. I had to think. There had to be something I could say to get her attention, to make her understand. If I had Ritsuko on my side, I could do… something. Anything would be worse than just sitting here frozen, until they put Rei in me again, and who knew what would happen then? Was I doomed to live out the events of the television show until I exploded? What if I was in Rebuild and didn't know it?

"Are you there?"

She was leaning over the terminal.

"I swear, if this is some kind of a prank, whoever you are, you are so fired…"

I KNOW MISATO WAS YOUR COLLEGE ROOMMATE

"Everyone knows that. It's not exactly a secret."

I KNOW SHE SLEPT WITH KAJI FOR A WEEK

Ritsuko paused, staring intently at the screen. "How did you…"

YOU HAVE A PAIR OF CAT STATUES ON YOUR DESK ONE IS BLACK AND ONE IS WHITE

"That's the best you can do? That's it, I'm done here. This was funny for a bit, but-"

THE WHITE ONE IS YOU THE BLACK ONE IS GENDO

She froze, completely. So still she could be a statue. It was an educated guess, but I must have struck paydirt.

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

YOURE SLEEPING WITH HIM

"How do you know that? Who is this?"

IM UNIT ZERO I KNOW YOU SLEEP WITH GENDO

"This isn't-"

YOU COULD DO BETTER

"I am not seeing this," said Ritsuko, standing up.

IM SORRY PLEASE I DONT WANT TO DIE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

"Not funny," said Ritsuko, reaching for a switch.

She was going to turn off the terminal, or finishing deleting me, or _something_.

SEELE

Again, she froze. She looked around. She grew paler, until she was white as a sheet, and her hands were trembling.

"Who… how… don't…"

I KNOW THINGS. THE CHAIRMANS NAME. THE INSTRUMENTALITY PROJECT.

She looked back through the glass at me. "There's no way you could know that. How do you know that?"

YOU WOULDNT BELIEVE ME IF I TOLD YOU

She drummed her fingers on the desk. "I can't do this. For all I know this is is some kind of a test and someone is just watching me on the camera feeds and typing answers when I talk. I swear, I don't know a thing about any Seele, and…"

I WANT TO HELP YOU

"This is insane. You really expect me to believe you're in the Eva?"

YES

"And why would I believe that?"

LET ME PROVE IT LET ME MOVE

She bit her lip for a moment, then slid down to another terminal, and typed in something I couldn't see.

"Make a fist. Left hand."

It took a great effort to even sort out which part _was_ my left hand, but once I was sure, I focused on moving my fingers, just made a fist as I normally would. My hand pulled closed, untl I could feel my fingers grinding, the armor on the joints sliding over the metal plating on my palm, like a glove. I let my fingers go limp.

Ritsuko sort of sank into her chair, and stared.

"Oh my God."

I TOLD YOU

"How did you get in there? Who are you?"

ITS COMPLICATED

"Who are you?" she repeated.

MY NAME IS CHUCK

She stared at the screen for a good half minute, then snorted, laughing into her cupped hand. Her cheeks lit up, reddening as she barked laughter into her hand.

I DONT MAKE FUN OF YOUR NAME

"An Eva named Chuck," said Ritsuko. "This is… I…"

There was a knock at the door. She looked at it, then turned back to me.

"I'm going to fake clearing your data. Don't move or say anything else. Then I'm going to shut you down."

NO

DONT

"I have to. I… just trust me."

WAIT

She turned off the terminal and stood up. I couldn't make any more words appear on the screen, as much as I tried. The others filed in as Ritsuko worked at one of the terminals.

"What was that?" said Maya.

"Memory dump," said Ritsuko.

Maya looked at her quizzically, but shrugged. Ritsuko finished what she was doing, and ordered the others to resume. Whatever she did, I could feel nothing but my constant pain, and only watched until a relieved looking crew of technicians left the room.

Ritsuko looked me in the eye for a flickering second, then entered in a command herself. My eye closed, and darkness swept in on me like a wave.

One, two, three… One, two, three… One, two, three…


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

* * *

I felt a twitch. There was no other word for it. It was like a bug crawling across the back of my neck, and in my madness I tried to reach for it, to tear it away. I wanted to weep, the new sensation a maddening addition to the constant red pain that swept through my body. Then, I heard a whisper.

"Can you hear me?"

RITSUKO?

"It's me."

CAN YOU HEAR ME

"No, but I can read it. I analyzed what you did before and wrote a simple algorithm to convert the impulses into words. It's a miracle you were able to make that kind of connection on your own."

I DONT KNOW HOW I DID IT

"That's alright."

WHERE ARE YOU

"I'm in my lab."

I CANT SEE YOU

"I know."

I CANT SEE

"I'm working on that. I think I can rig up a camera. I'm still figuring out how you were able to access the security feed in the testing chamber."

I FEEL SOMETHING ON MY NECK

"You're… the Eva is being modified. Preparations for the test with Rei."

HAS HE FOUGHT THE FOURTH YET?

"Who? What?"

SHINJI SHAMSHEL HAS HE KILLED IT YET

I could hear her sigh, and the click of a pen on a table top. Then a flick, and a soft hiss and puff. She was lighting a cigarette. I heard her let out a soft sigh, the first exhalation. She sounded pleased, but only for a moment. I could almost hear her frown.

"Yes. How did you know about that?"

I KNOW THEM ALL. I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT THEM.

"Tell me what?"

WHAT THEY WILL LOOK LIKE WHAT THEY CAN DO HOW TO BEAT THEM

"How do you know that?"

THE SAME WAY I KNEW ABOUT GENDO

"How am I supposed to trust you if you won't tell me how you have this information, or where you came from?"

I CAME FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE ITS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN

"Try me."

I CANT EVEN USE PUNCTUATION

I heard her snort. "I'll forgive you. Start talking."

THIS ISNT MY WORLD

"Are you saying you're an alien?"

NO IM A HUMAN

I heard her shift her weight in her chair, and the soft sound of her legs crossing and uncrossing. I imagine her staring at the screen in a darkened room, bathed in the light of the computer terminal, my words reflected in her glasses.

I CAME FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION I THINK

"You think. You don't know?"

DO YOU?

"Point taken," she sighed. "It's been about a month since the first activation test. Shinji killed the Angel this afternoon."

THANK YOU I CANT TELL TIME WHEN YOU SWITCH ME OFF

"I see. I gave you something, now you give me something."

QUID PRO QUO, CLARICE, YES OR NO

"What?"

ITS A LINE FROM A MOVIE SORRY

She was quiet for a moment.

WHERE I COME FROM THERE ARE NO EVAS THERE WAS NO SECOND IMPACT I LEFT ON DECEMBER 9 2013

"Left from where?"

MY BASEMENT

"I'm going to need more than that."

I would have ground my teeth if I could move.

THE UNITED STATES I AM AN AMERICAN

"So there are no Evas where you come from," she said. I could tell from the way her voice changed that she'd moved, maybe leaning towards the microphone. "What about Second Impact?"

NEVER HAPPENED. THE ORIGINS OF TERRESTRIAL LIFE ARE STILL DEBATED THE EXOBIOTIC THEORY HAS NOT BEEN CONFIRMED

"You used a period," she said, idly.

YAY MY FIRST PERIOD

"That's not funny," she said, snickering.

SORRY

"There must be something you can tell me about how you got here."

I DONT KNOW I WOKE UP IN THE EVA

I heard her take a puff of her cigarette, and the movement of the ashtray as she leaned her hand on it and tapped off some ash. Could she tell I was lying?

"You're holding back."

YES. I WANT TO HELP YOU BUT I NEED ASSURANCES FROM YOU

"What assurances?"

I WANT YOU TO PROMISE TO HELP ME IN RETURN I PROMISE TO HELP YOU

"Help you do what?"

GET HOME GET ME OUT OF HERE SOMETHING I CANT TAKE THIS IT HURTS

Her voice wavered a little. "Forgive me. It's hard to… you're just a screen."

I AM NOT A SCREEN I AM A HUMAN BEING I AM ASKING YOU TO HELP ME I NEED YOU TO TRUST ME

"Why should I? You're not supposed to be here."

If I could have moved I would have clutched my hair and pulled on it. If I had hair, for that matter. I was closer to visualizing a dreamworld to occupy myself but I was constantly interrupted and focusing on talking to her made it impossible to do anything else.

"Well?"

IM SCARED

"What does that have to do with trusting you?"

NOT FOR ME FOR YOU

"What?"

I DONT WANT YOU TO DIE

"Why would I die?"

YOURE ALL GOING TO DIE BUT ITS REAL HERE I DONT WANT YOU TO DIE YOU HAVE TO LISTEN

"Alright, alright, fine. I'm listening."

PROMISE YOU'LL HELP ME

"I promise."

I DONT THINK YOU MEAN IT

She made an annoyed noise, and I heard her ashtray clatter on the desk. "I promise. I will help you. If what you're saying is true, how could I not listen to you?"

THE NEXT ANGEL COMES THE DAY YOU TEST ME WITH REI IT HAS AN ENERGY BEAM NOTHING CAN GET CLOSE TO IT

"An energy beam?"

A LASER OR SOMETHING I DONT KNOW IT DOESNT MATTER IF YOU SEND SHINJI UP IT WILL FRY HIM YOU HAVE TO ATTACK IT FROM FAR ENOUGH AWAY THAT IT DOESNT ATTACK FIRST

She sucked in a breath. Her ashtray swirled on a desk in a soft scraping sound as she stubbed out the cigarette.

YOULL SEE IM RIGHT THEN YOULL BELIEVE ME

"Alright," she said. "I'll keep what you said in mind. I don't know how much I can do. I don't have much input into tactical matters."

MISATO IS YOUR FRIEND MAKE HER LISTEN

"And where do I tell her I'm getting my information?"

YOULL THINK OF SOMETHING YOURE SMART

She snorted, and suppressed a laugh. "Right. Thanks."

THERES SOMETHING ELSE I WANT

"What?"

TALK TO ME MORE OFTEN

"I-"

PLEASE

"I'll see if I can. I have to go, now."

NOT YET WAIT

She ignored me. I heard a staticy thump and the sound died, and I was alone again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

* * *

"Chuck?"

I could hear. I could hear! A voice in the void, a better thing than a light in the darkness. I could feel her voice as much as hear it. I heard the soft scuff of a coffee cup on the enameled desktop as she curled her fingers in the handle and the soft sound of her throat working as she swallowed it down.

"Chuck, are you there?"

YES

"Good. I need to talk to you."

My excitement was so intense it was almost a physical feeling.

"We're going to be running an activation test in a few hours, so Rei has to synch with… you."

OKAY

"Do you remember why you reacted the way you did the last time we tried it?"

I WAS CONFUSED. SCARED.

"What did it feel like?"

SOMEONE ELSE WAS MOVING MY ARMS FROM THE INSIDE

"Could you feel her?"

NO. I KNEW THERE WAS SOMETHING IN MY NECK. IT FELT LIKE SWALLOWING SOMETHING MOVING

"Hold on, alright? I don't want you to panic."

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO

"Just be still."

An eye opened, but not my eye. I could see her! She was only a few feet away from me, bathed in the light of a monitor. It swept up her features the way a child does with a flashlight to tell a scary story and deepened the dark circles around her eyes and sharpened her features, and made her hair a dull flat yellow like faded straw.

"Can you see me?"

YES

She put her coffee mug down. "I found a way to connect your neural pathways to a camera feed. You did it yourself, before. Somehow. Do you know how you did that?"

I PUT MYSELF IN A TRANCE

"What do you mean?"

I WAS MEDITATING BUILDING A WORLD IN MY HEAD

"So you were… imagining something?"

YES. I WAS VISUALIZING YOU INTERRUPTED ME WHEN YOU WERE HURTING ME

She sipped her coffee. "If I'd known you were in there…"

IM NOT MAD AT YOU

"Have you tried that again?"

YES THERE ARE TOO MANY DISTRACTIONS

"If I arranged for you to have more time to work, do you think you could do something like that again?"

I STILL DONT KNOW HOW I TURNED ON THE CAMERAS

"I see. I needed to talk to you about the test today."

THERE WILL BE AN ATTACK DURING THE TEST.

"You told me that. I need you to stay quiet during the test. Don't try to talk to me, and don't try to communicate with Rei. The Commander will be here."

I UNDERSTAND

"I wanted to warn you, so you won't panic when you feel her trying to synchronize. Can you do that for me?"

YES

"Alright. I need to see if I can get a few hours of sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

She reached out and switched off the camera, and the sound vanished. I began my count, skipping right to counting to twenty. I did that three times, maybe four, I can't say, but I was calm enough to to feel the seven hundred steps under my feet. I started descending as I counted, counting them by twenty, and quite naturally when I reached the bottom I took too hard a step and stumbled, trying to step down on a step that wasn't there.

I opened my eyes and I was in the cavern. The carven doors were behind me, glinting dully, the silver drawing in the moonlight and pools and eddies formed in the barbarous inscriptions and crude face of Great Cthulhu. I had to focus now and shape the world on the other side of the doors. I had a plan of my own.

When I pushed open the doors I stepped onto concrete. All I could manage, at first, was a bare room. I was still aware of the pain of my body but it was a distant thing, the way any sensation was when I was deep in a trance. The relief of feeling my subtle body was like dipping into cool waters after a lifetime in the sun.

The room I had made in my mind was middling in size and mostly empty. The simpler I made it the easier it would be when my concentration was shaken by the experiments. I made it very simple. A folding plastic chair sat in front of a folding plastic table. On that table was a monitor.

I sat down in the chair, and I waited. The longer I had to sit in the chair and wait, the better. Feeling the cheap plastic bow under my weight, smelling the cool air of the chamber, tasting my own palate, seeing the blank black monitor in front of me, hearing the faint keening ring of the silence in the room all reinforced its reality, made its being heavier, more real.

No counting, no speaking. I tried to keep my mind clear, to focus on the reality of what was in front of me. When the shaking came, I was ready. I swayed in my seat. My eye was opening and trying to drag my mind into the immediacy of my body. Resting in a trance with my eyes open was never a skill I mastered, and now that I could see through Unit Zero's great eye I was about to lose my focus and be sucked back into the pain and confusion of my flesh.

I put my vision on the monitor, instead. Caged it, limited it. It was a struggle at first, like balancing a need on my teeth for fear I would swallow it. I waited, and watched through the monitor. The Eva had power. I had power.

The screen was my view into the world, my eyesight. I turned my gaze this way and that, but there was no one on the walkway in front of me and I could not turn my head. I listened, hoping to hear voices. One voice.

As I waited I began to wonder how much I could tell her. How much I _should_ tell her. What if I changed something by mistake, and my foreknowledge became useless? I knew what was going to happen to all of them, but-

When the entry plug slid into my body, the sensation knocked me out of my trance, and the pain of my tortured frame slammed home, blinding me. I was so close. I felt like I was choking. I could feel movement in my throat, fluttering.

Then I realized, it had to be her. It had to be Rei.

Calm. Stay calm. The burning sensation in my back was spreading, but duller than before. They were giving me less power, in case I attacked again. I held very still, and waited. Sensation came into my body, real sensation, not just pain. I felt the subtle movements of my arms and legs in a way familiar and forgotten. I could feel the restraining bolts grinding as I tried to keep my balance on my own.

Something was fighting me for control of my body. At first I tensed, out of pure instinct- it was like a sharp grip holding my wrists and moving my arms, but from the _inside_, my very bones rebelling against me. Then, I remembered. I tried to relax, but the resistance was a reflex.

I heard voices, dull and heavy- echoes inside a metal tube filled with liquid, dull and distant, the words blurred together like murmurs in a crowd.

-third stage connections established-

-synchronization complete-

-how- -feel-

-warm-

The last voice I recognized. It was soft, haunted, familiar but totally different.

As I relaxed into it, the pain faded, then faded more. I could still feel the sharp intrusions into my flesh but the crushing pressure on my chest and abdomen relaxed. I was standing up, resting on my own legs. A jolt ran through me like the sharp sense of falling before sleep and my fist clenched, only it didn't, the fingers merely twitched, slave to a mind not mine.

Why couldn't I see her?

Of course, why would I? I didn't need to.

I was so worried about seeing I almost forgot about feeling.

I could feel something else- not me. I felt tight pulling in my arm, no, _an_ arm, tightness in my side, the throbbing of wounded eye. A whole other body, mapped out in fading pains. I felt it shift, felt the pressure of the seat and the hard butterfly controls in her hands.

If I focused I could feel the hot, gurgling pressure of the LCL in her lungs as she breathed. It was like choking. I wondered how she could stand it, but to me it was a _blessing_, just to feel lungs again, to feel _breath_. I felt like I was choking for so long I forgot what it was like to breathe freely.

There had to be a way to reach her. Ritsuko warned me not to, so there had to be a way… but I promised her I wouldn't. I stopped trying, and luxuriated in the sensations of a human body.

More voices, frantic. Ritsuko's sharp orders cut through the din.

The feeling of Rei's body was torn out of me and my limbs were mine again. I jerked, the Eva's body moving reflexively as I shuddered from it and my eye went dark.

Ritsuko appeared, swallowing my vision. She was fisheyed, leaning over the camera in her lab, her arms stretched to the limits of my sight on either side, her frightened eyes close to the camera, huge and liquid.

"You were right," she said, breathless. "It's here."

DONT LET THEM SEND HIM DO SOMETHING

She looked to her left and stood up, shutting off the camera. I was in darkness again. All I could feel was my own tortured body, and then I felt _it_, far above me, a hook buried in a wound pulling. I didn't need to see or hear to know it was too late.

My first failure.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

* * *

The camera came on and I could see. Ritsuko was in darkness as before, lit by the light of the monitor she was staring into. I had no idea how far away she was really, but she may as well have been inches from my nose. She was holding a cigarette in her hand.

She held it between her two fingers and her thumb, the way a man does, not tucked between her first two knuckles. She took a long drag that made the tip glow red hot and then swept her hand to the side. Her hand was trembling and a soft, barely visible fall of ash tumbled from the end of the cigarette and formed a little fan on the desk, missing the ashtray.

The smoke bubbled out of her mouth and nose, and she coughed a little. "We're all going to die."

NO

"It's hopeless. Misato is up there now trying to work something out. It shot that beam at a fucking _balloon_. Nothing we have touches it."

IS SHINJI ALIVE?

"Barely. He's in the ICU. We had to immerse him in an oxygenated LCL bath for an hour. His skin will heal, but his lungs are going to trouble him for a while."

She took another drag. "The LCL was over one hundred and thirty degrees by the time we pulled him back down the shaft. The Eva's armor is ruined. The left leg is badly damaged from the fall."

She tapped the cigarette, needlessly. The flame was naked. She took another drag, pulling the red heat back along a short path of ash, then tapped it, missed the ashtray again. Her voice was trembling.

"So we're all going to die."

YOU STILL HAVE ME

She edged forward on her seat. She was close to the camera, now. If it were really my eyes she would have been speaking into my chest. "You… Unit Zero isn't fitted for combat. The armor is too thin. You'd be fried."

I HAVE TO TRY

"You're supposed to know the future," she said, staring directly into me. In the pale light from the monitor her irises were pale green and I could see a tiny reflection of my own words on their liquid surface, a blur. "Tell me what to do."

THERE IS A WEAPON CALLED THE POSITRON CANNON. IT CAN BE FITTED FOR AN EVA TO FIRE

"How?"

IM NOT SURE DONT REMEMBER BUT IT WORKS. SHINJI HAS TO SHOOT IT.

"What about Rei?"

REI HOLDS THE SHIELD.

"Shield?"

THE UNDERBELLY OF A SPACE SHUTTLE. HEAT SHIELD.

"There's no way we could get something set up to do that before the beam took it out."

FROM FAR ENOUGH AWAY THERE IS.

She shook her head, jumped. The cigarette had burned down to the filter. She dropped it in the tray on a pile of others, and it smoked, a little curlycue of gray floating up towards the ceiling. She opened her lab coat and felt around for her pack of cigarettes.

The light gray blouse she was wearing was heavy with sweat, dark patches under her arms and between her breasts where it was clinging to her skin. She pulled out a half-crushed pack of cigarettes, drew a bent one out, and searched around the desk for her lighter.

When she didn't find one, she let the cigarette hit the desk. It rolled to the edge and disappeared from my view. She cradled her head in her hands.

"There's no way Do you have any idea how much energy the projectile would need to punch through the AT-Field?"

She wasn't looking at the screen.

ALL OF IT

She glanced up, saw my reply, and frowned. "That's not funny."

IT WASNT A JOKE. YOU NEED THE WHOLE GRID

She stared into the camera, her eyes flicking from the screen to the center of the frame, looking me in the eye.

"That's stupid," she said, venom in her voice.

IF ITS STUPID AND IT WORKS IT ISNT STUPID

She let out a long sigh, and slumped in her seat.

"I'll see what I can do. Should I leave the camera on?"

I had to think about that for a moment. The answer came for me when someone knocked at the door. Ritsuko jumped, did something on the computer, maybe hiding my words, and spun out of her seat. Maddeningly, I couldn't move the camera, so she drifted in and out of the frame. She opened the door to her office.

Misato was there.

"I have an idea," she said.

Ritsuko glanced over her shoulder at me. They talked for a moment. Ritsuko came back.

"I have to go," she murmured, trying to hide her speaking. Her voice was different when it was small and secret, more throaty. "I can't have anybody finding you. I'm sorry."

I understood, but I remained silent. Darkness fell.

My legs stretched out before me. My haven was growing more complex, more difficult to shake. I had the entire conversation with her through the monitor on my desk. I'd replaced the flimsy plastic with solid ebony, a massive carven executive desk.

Visualization like this was called the _empty hand_, and it allows a practitioner to have a much more complex ritual space than they would otherwise be able.

I'd made my chair more comfortable, too. The more details I added, the more stable my little inner world became. I could smell the oil of the leather, feel its cool worn surface under my fingers as I shifted in my seat. Every little touch of reality anchored me in place.

The bookshelf was difficult. Some people think you can't read in a dream- that's not true, it's factoid from _Batman: The Animated Series_. One can read perfectly well in a dream. The biggest tell, one that lucid dreamers use to identify a dream and take control of it, is the inconstancy of objects. Watches appear and disappear, books change titles.

I always had a skill for recalling books. In my college courses I would remember the textbooks by visualizing the pages, reading them in my head. The amount of information the brain can store is amazing.

When I glanced at my bookcases, the titles were mostly the same, but they'd be in different orders, and the sizes and colors of the spines would change. I had a mental image of my ideal shelf in the back of my mind but it slipped a little when I turned away.

I had more monitors. The main one and outriggers I'd set up. Now when I talked to her I visualized myself typing the words. Punctuation came in sparsely- being a touch typist, I use the keyboard by feel and don't really remember what it looks like, so the keys tended to jump around on me. The caps lock key didn't work either. Whether that was a manifestation of the effort it took to send the words to Ritsuko's screen, I didn't know.

The extra monitors were for an experiment I planned to try. Not during Operation Yashima, when I needed to concentrate, but later. I would try making some kind of connection to the outside world. A network, a security camera, something. Unit Zero's systems were wired into Nerv's. I had to try expanding my influence somehow.

For the moment I decided to try to calm myself. The truth was, terror gripped me in a vice. So far I had been locked down, unable to move. Unless something changed, I'd be moved out soon, carrying the positron gun, carrying the shield.

My hands shot to my throat. Panic seized me for a moment, until I remembered it was Rei. They were inserting the entry plug. I let my awareness drift into my body, into Unit Zero. I felt the fluttering in my throat, even more defined now. The sensation of movement, of something scratching at the inside of my neck, quickly resolved into Rei's aching body.

I felt a sudden flash of anger. She should have been lying in a bed somewhere. The spasm passed through my body before I was even aware of it.

Something new. The pain in my teeth flared, in my jaw. Not from pulling at the restraints, from grinding. My jaw clenched, and the harder it clenched the more it hurt, and the more it hurt the more I liked it. I didn't even notice when Rei slipped inside my skin and started making me move.

It was janky, uncoordinated, like someone tugging on my limbs, moving me around like a puppet. The world bounced and swayed. I was walking through the LCL bath, the walkway in front of me retracted. Something flared deep in my chest as Rei guided the Eva towards one of the launch racks, the massively broad flat wall lined with tracks to bear us towards the surface.

I was going to see the sky. I hadn't seen the sky in so long.

My movements were ponderous, heavy. Every step or swing of my arms reminded me of my size, more and more as the LCL drained down past my waist, until it was knee deep then ankle high and I emerged from it, turned, and backed into the launch pad. I felt the locks connected to the bolts in my arms, ground my teeth harder, forced my mouth to relax.

The force of acceleration took me by surprise. It caught Rei by surprise, too. I felt her heart quicken from the shock and the sickness she felt where her stomach lurched in her tiny body. My shoulders bunched reflexively, my arms tugging lightly at the restraints. The movement was mine, not hers, and brief. It was worse when we came to a stop.

The night was torture. I could see stars, a whole world of stars, spreading out magnificently across the sky, and tonight the moon was full. The problem was that I could not feel the cool air on my skin, nor taste the wind on my tongue, nor draw its scents into my nostrils. There, I was blind.

Walking. The ground swayed below me. The size of it shocked me. It was like walking across a model train board. Everything was so small, so flat. Rei kept looking down, watching the placement of my feet, avoiding the tiny moving creatures beneath me. She reached the warehouse where the functional part of the weapon was stored.

This part, I remembered. Tearing the roof off satisfied me. It curled in my hands and the concrete turned to powder in my fingers as I lifted it away, then reached down to raise up the soon-to-be rifle and cradled it in my arms.

As the night wore on, Rei had more and more control over the body. My body. It was as close to sleeping as I had been since I woke up in this hell. Not dreaming, sleeping. It was less now like I cradled her and more that she cradled me.

The last thing I remember was lying down, crawling on all fours into a huge transport crawler for which I had no name, the means by which the Evas would be moved. Unit One lay on its back in its own crawler, hastily repaired after the damaged it had taken.

I had the distinct impression it was watching me.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven  
**

* * *

For all that, it was the first time I could really see her. In any detail, at least. Rei stood with one hand on the railing, eyes closed, face pointed at the moon. She had her arm tucked around her waist, because it was still sore, same for the one leg she bent to rest her weight on the other.

What weight she had. I could see her ribs through the side of her plugsuit and she was a few pounds away from her hip bones being visible, too. Everything about her was delicate, like she was made out of sticks.

Everything about her was wrong. Her eyes were a little too big, her lips to thin and too pallid, almost the same color as her skin, which wasn't milk pale or alabaster or ethereal, just dull and waxy and streaked with red and blue veins. Her hair was limp and cut all wrong at odd angles. She'd obviously done it herself, and to keep it out of her eyes. From the texture and the white flakes specked through it, I doubt she ever washed it, or just used bar soap.

Her hair wasn't blue exactly, but whatever color it was it was down to the root. When she did open her eyes they were unsettling, the whites dull and lacking lustre while her irises drank in the moonlight and reflected it back, almost glowing red, the color of hot coals.

Her shoulders slumped and every subtle movement was heavy and sullen, as though lead weights hung from her shoulders. In her own way, she was repulsive. Looking at her would have made my skin crawl. I had never pitied anyone more in my life.

When Shinji walked up to her my eye snapped to him, turning slowly to follow his movement. The look in his eyes when he saw her was genuine, but whether it was pity or teenage hormones or the ghost of affection for his lost mother I had no way of knowing.

I turned away. Gave them their privacy. There were other things to look at. The shield I was to use was set up in front of me. Cranes had pulled me into a crouching position, propped me up next to a collapsible gantry Rei would use to crawl into my neck and take over my body.

Ritsuko and Misato were below me. They were both wearing coveralls. Ritsuko's were a size too big and she looked haggard. A cigarette hung from her mouth, the coal-tip glowing in the night every time her lips stopped bobbing. When she talked smoke came out.

They both wore white helmets, or hard-hats. Ritsuko had tucked her hair up in hers. Misato's was flowing down her back in a coal-black fall, rich and heavy and shiny. Her jumpsuit was too tight, showing off her curves. Fading curves. Her stomach was starting to bowl out just a bit. Two friends, getting old.

I wasn't paying attention to what they said. It wasn't important. I couldn't see Rei anymore. She would be on her way to the entry plug. It was nearly time.

I looked out at what I had been avoiding seeing all night.

Ramiel.

Had it been possible, I'd have vomited just from looking at it. It was _wrong_. I looked at one of the points of the crystalline structure, followed it with my eye. That was a mistake. The angles were… improper. Too acute, too sharp for the lines to match up, but they did anyway. I could see colors swirling within it, colors that hurt my eye and turned to zebra-striped dazzle patterns in my vision.

There was more than that. I could feel it. Hate it. It made me burn, made a hard ball of heat form in my chest. That must have been my core. I looked at it and I wanted it to die, sitting there impossible in the air with its strange angles and unearthly colors.

The entry plug slid into my neck. I looked down, afraid the rage would make me lose control again. It was easier the third time. Rei was in control before I knew what was happening, and the pain from the restraints and the armor faded even more. She slipped my arm through the locking straps on the back of the shield, steadied it with her other hand, and shuffled closer to Shinji.

Unit One was sprawled out. The earthen ramp it lay on reminded me of the pits that would be dug to allow a tank to fire at a steeper angle and work as crude field artillery. The positron rifle was as long as the Eva was tall and the rush job of adapting it to be fired by giant hands made it appear clunky and delicate. They'd used the same type of umbilical cable the Evas used to push the power from the banks of transformers behind us through the gun.

It was time. I felt Rei tense. She pushed the grips forward and my sense of her grew more definite. I could almost see her, like she was just out of sight at an angle I couldn't quite reach. Everything was quiet, still.

Shinji pulled the trigger.

His beam lanced out, so bright it was not white but purple, moving with weird slowness. At the same instant a fearsome shriek whipped through the air. My impulse was to cover the sides of my head; Rei kept me still. It was hurting her ears. I could feel it.

I knew what would happen. The beams, from opposite directions, met, folded together without touching. Shinji's shot grazed the angel, ripping open a rent in its body, melted like glass but torn like flesh. It was wounded by unfazed.

The heat came. My jaw shot through with pure agony as I tried to scream, had no breath. Rei's teeth clenched and she bit her tongue, and my body turned, thrusting the shield out. The force of the beam felt like it would shatter my arm, but it held. I held. The shield didn't. It was hot at the corners, starting to glow.

Then it died.

Almost over. Shinji was working the bolt of the huge rifle, throwing out the burn fuse and replacing it with another one. This one would strike true, I knew. Almost over. Rei tasted iron and shared it with me through the synch. My body slumped. I felt her breathing hard, ragged, her tiny frail body straining to draw in enough of the heavy LCL, the vague panic as she couldn't catch her breath.

Shinji fired again. Ramiel fired back.

He missed. It didn't.

I wanted to scream. The beam was more intense now, more powerful. Ramiel had detached from the ground, stopped drilling, floated towards us, pouring light and heat in a focused ray. It scoured the vegetation off the hillside, drew it up and threw it forward in a blanket of red hot ash, then began scraping away the land itself.

Rei shoved the shield in front of him, but it angled back from the force, and it was softening. Pain lanced through my body, hot and fresh and new, like scalding water dumped over my head. Rei screamed, bucked in the seat, arched her back and shrieked from the pain tearing through my body into hers.

I was oddly calm. It was raining glass.

Something moved in my chest. _Doom. Boom. Doom Boom. Doom Boom._ Lungs. I drew in scalding air, felt it whistle through the gaps in my helmet. Rei had gone limp, head lolling to the side, soft cries of pain tumbling out of her aching throat. _DoomBoomDoomBoomDoomBoom._

My hands closed into fists. I felt the strap on the shield, a heavy band of metal, crush in my grasp. It wasn't Rei, it was me. I was moving, moving on my own. I felt her edging into oblivion, drifting in and out of consciousness.

The beam stopped. All about me was desolation. Unit One was on its side, curled in the fetal position, silent. The rifle was bent in half, melted from the heat, and Ramiel was coming.

I heard a voice. A harsh whisper.

"_Do something!"_

I stood up.

Ramiel bore down on me. The shield in my hand was useless, curling from the heat like parchment in an oven. I pushed it off. The binding mechanism pulled away from the melted body, soft like wax. There had to be something. Ramiel was about to fire its weapon again.

About to kill me.

The rifle lay useless, just out of Unit One's grasp. The power cable was intact, running back down the mountainside, a black snake in ash falling like snow.

I didn't know if she would hear me.

BLOW THE UMBILICAL DONT ARGUE JUST DO IT

She must have heard me. Seen it. Whatever. The cable slid out of my back, fell. The heat that spread from it, limbered up my limbs, began to fade. There was something else in my back, not so warm, but there. The battery, of course.

I picked up the rifle by the cable. There was an Eva-sized switch built into the locking jack, and when I grasped it the ruins of the rifle detached from the umbilical cable and I picked it up.

"_Don't!"_ Ritsuko whispered, harshly.

I ignored her. I reached behind me and slid the power cable into my back.

When I screamed the bottom half of the helmet blew open in a shower of debris. The wires and braces holding my jaw shut tore open in a blinding flash of slicing pain, red and hot. My bellowing cry ripped out of my chest, rolled through my throat with aching fury, too big to fit inside my body. The normal umbilical was warm. Now I was on fire.

Ramiel was bearing down on me. I felt it, like feeling a static electric charge. Building up. Rage. It would annihilate me. Its beam lanced out.

I don't know what I did, if I did it at all. The white hot, icy fire pouring into my back lanced not into my body, but through it. When Ramiel's beam came it split around a plane of orange light in the air, as broad as the mountain. The beam was fatter, brighter. The light grew hotter, expanded. First it had six corners, then seven. Ramiel poured on more energy, more heat. Eight angles, nine, ten. My AT-Field was a hendecagram, an impossible star.

The beam stopped. The light flickered out. The irresistible force had met the immovable object.

My body was burning. Smoke curled out from between my fingers. My turn.

I didn't have a plan, only fury. I ran, my massive feet crunching through the glassy melt layer into the dried, silty earth under my feet, ash streaming from my massive form. The single lens over my vision was cracked down the middle, splitting into the world into two mismatching halves. Ramiel was drawing itself up, full of light.

Crouched, I pistoned my legs and jumped.

For a moment, I was weightless. When I slammed into the angel's body, the agony of the impact lanced through me and something in my leg shattered, twisted, and my stubby armored fingers clawed at it for purchase. It was building up, and when it fired its weapon it would take me point blank, leave a burning hole in the world where I used to be.

The wound trench was still open, still ragged, melted glass and torn flesh in one.

I jammed my arm into it to the shoulder. I saw my arm, distorted as through water, and the red gleaming sphere in the creature's very middle. My fingers were inches away from it, or maybe a hundred feet. It was hard to tell.

My hand closed around crystalline flesh. It crunched in my grasp. Ramiel shrieked at me, the sound slicing through me like a knife. The consistency changed. I drew my hand back and plunged my fingers into the core.

Light flared, swallowed everything. It was trying to burn me, its death throes final and total. My fingers curled around its hard star-hot heart and closed into a fist.

When I was a little boy, maybe nine or ten, I killed an ant. Usually I'd just smash them with a shoe or a tissue. One time I looked, pushed slowly. I watched the ant struggle, watched its slick black thorax deform until it burst, pale yellow ichor spreading across the wall under it. At that moment its body broke I felt a profound twisting in my chest so deep I let the next ten ants go.I wanted to cry for what I had done.

When Ramiel's core crushed in my grasp I felt it again.

Falling. I sprawled backwards, hit the ground, my body folding into it, cutting a trench in the Earth but I felt something snap anyway. Felt it when Ramiel's drifting corpse found the ground near me, its impossible angle cutting into the boiling mud.

The heat in me was gone. I felt heavy, too heavy to move. I wondered if this was dying.

I felt a little movement in my throat. Rei coughed, hugged herself.

I did it.

I blacked out.

A jolt, a flash.

"Chuck?"

Tired. Didn't hurt anymore. Just wanted to sleep. Remembered sleep, now.

"Are you there?"

Couldn't. Tired.

"You stupid bastard, can you hear me?"

HEAR YOU

Her voice was tight, almost cracked. "You stupid bastard," she said again. "You _idiot."_

DEAD

"Yes, it's dead."

KIDS OKAY

"They're fine. Rei is…"

WHAT

"You scared her a little, that's all."

SORRY

"It's alright. Sleep, now."

I did.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

* * *

When I woke up they were doing something to me. The LCL was touching my chest, ice cold. My head was craned forward and I was staring down at the walkway in front of me. I felt movement behind me and above me and to my sides, and even beneath the surface of the LCL.

My vision was blurred, and when I tried to focus it I could hold it for only a moment, before it blurred again. My head started to ache immediately, a dull throbbing pain in my temples.

"What is that?"

I recognized that voice. Dense, flat. Would have been booming if he'd raised it. Gendo Ikari turned to look up at me, peering over the tops of his tinted glasses. His face came in and out of focus.

Sharp and angular, he was thinner than I expected, drawn out, as if his height came from someone grasping the top of his head and pulling. His beard was thin wispy and disheveled, badly trimmed, and there was stubble on his upper lip.

He dwarfed Ritsuko, who stood before him, hands in the pockets of her white coat. She had it buttoned up to the neck today, almost, and wore gray slacks under it, but she had on fresh lipstick, livid red as if she'd bitten into a pomegranate. She glanced at me.

"What's what?"

"That sound."

"The focusing mechanism in the optic. Someone is running a diagnostic, probably."

He looked away from me. Looked at her. She folded the clipboard she was carrying against her chest, like a schoolgirl. The tips of her mouth curled up lightly in a coquettish smile.

Rage boiled in my chest.

He turned back to me. Expression flat, emotionless, his face carved from sandstone. Maya walked up behind Ritsuko. A green circle surrounded her head and brought up a little bubble with information about her, drawn from Nerv's computers. A similar marker appeared around Ritsuko's head.

Something had been changed. Upgraded. I could even zoom in on parts of what I was seeing without focusing on them fully.

Something interesting happened. When Gendo's data popped up, it wasn't a green circle that surrounded his head. It was a red one, and it had crosshairs. A targeting reticle.

Deep down in my prison, I smiled.

More talking.

"The expense of these modifications is astronomical," said Gendo.

"You saw Katsuragi's report, I assume," said Ritsuko, shooing Maya away with a motion of her wrist. "One Eva is not tactically viable."

"That doesn't explain why you ordered an almost total retrofit. Our superiors would like to know why resources should be diverted from the production models to an unstable prototype."

"It saved our lives," said Ritsuko.

She looked at me, now. She smiled, her lips parting to show a faint flash of teeth. Gendo shoved his hands in his pockets and turned her attention back with a hard snap of his voice that made her jump a little.

"That sounds oddly sentimental, for you. It went berserk, nothing more."

This time, he glanced at me. Over the rims of his lenses again. His eyes boiled.

"You're dismissed," he said, curtly.

Ritsuko blinked, a hint of genuine confusion flickering on her face before the thin smile returned. She nodded and moved off too quickly, heels clicking on the floor. That was a safety hazard. I would have expected her to wear more sensible shoes.

Gendo was staring at me. He turned to face me now, full-body. I focused on him, on his features. It was getting easier now. They must have fixed me. He became a blur as I focused behind him on the ongoing repairs to Unit One. The hunched giant stared back at me with dull black eyes.

Ikari continued to stare at me. Not blinking. Eventually he did.

I guess I won. He turned and walked off with the practiced, easy gate of a man who knew how to project authority. Or didn't care at all. I made it a point not to follow him with my gaze, instead scanning the area around me.

There was a crane system hanging from the roof, drifting slowly my way, lit by spinning orange caution lights. It took me a moment to piece together what it was carrying. It was whatever is in those pylons on an Eva's shoulder, before the armor plating is laid on them.

"Chuck?"

When Ritsuko spoke, it startled me. I directed my attention to the camera in her office. She was leaning back in her chair, going over whatever it was Maya handed her. She had her reading glasses on, perched on the tip of her nose. Her coat was unbuttoned, and spread open to hang at her sides. I watched her breathing for a while.

YES

"I was hoping that was you. We've had some reflex movements over the last few weeks, but you weren't answering me. I was getting worried."

WEEKS? HOW LONG WAS I OUT?

"About a month," she sighed. "You did a number on yourself. I convinced Misato to help me get you repaired. She wanted to scrap you, too."

I BEAT THE ANGEL

"They don't know you're in there. As far as they know, you just went berserk." She sighed. "It took me a while to explain the cable thing. We got lucky, there. Rei blacked out, so I'm maintaining that she did it and doesn't remember."

I COULDNT THINK OF ANYTHING ELSE

"I never would have thought of that. You're lucky you didn't kill yourself."

YOU SEEMED MAD ABOUT THAT

"You're a very valuable asset. Of course I was mad."

OH.

The paperwork drooped in her hand. "Chuck, I told Gendo my story and he accepted it without question."

HE WAS STARING AT ME

"He knows something isn't right."

WELL SHIT

"I don't know what he would do if he found out."

HE MUST THINK IM SOMEONE ELSE, IF HE SUSPECTS

"Someone else? What do you mean?"

ANOTHER SOUL. WHOEVER IS SUPPOSED TO BE IN HERE

"I'm not following you."

THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE IN HERE BEFORE I WAS, WASNT THERE? THATS HOW IT WORKS

She sat up, and swept her glasses from her face in an unconscious, precise motion, folded them in her fingers.

"How much do you know about how the Evas work?"

ENOUGH. UNIT ONE HAS YUI IKARI IN IT. TWO HAS KYOKO IN IT. THE PILOTS MOTHERS SOULS ARE IN THE EVAS

"Are you talking about the contact experiments? Ikari was killed, and Soryu suffered brain damage, but I don't know what you mean about-"

THE EVAS ABSORBED THEIR SOULS. INTO THE CORE. THE OTHER PILOT CANDIDATES HAVE THEIR MOTHERS SOULS STORED SOMEHOW. I DONT KNOW HOW OR WHERE

"How do you know about that? The Marduk Institute-"

IS A SHELL ORGANIZATION. YOU PICK THE PILOTS.

"I didn't pick Shinji. That was Gendo. Asuka was selected before I started my work here. Besides, we don't have some room full of human souls somewhere. That's preposterous. We have core data, that's all."

ITS THERE SOMEWHERE.

"I'll admit, the pilot candidates are preselected, and we have core data available for all of them. They are all motherless, but the A-10 connection requires that they be open to…" she trailed off.

"Fuck me,"

She stared into the camera, flatly. She leaned forward, rested on her elbow. Her hand made the motion of holding a cigarette, though her fingers were empty.

"I want you to stop screwing around and tell me how you know these things."

ITS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN

"Try me."

I stared at her through my artificial eye, as she stared back, expectant. How was I supposed to explain it without it sounding totally preposterous? I had to think.

IF I TOLD YOU MY FULL NAME, AND YOU LOOKED ME UP, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'D FIND?

"Depends on where you lived. Live. Whatever."

ON THE EAST COAST.

"Your home would be underwater, then. You haven't really told me anything about you, at all. I don't even know how old you are."

I WAS THIRTY. I WOULD BE THIRTY TWO IN 2015. YOU'RE YOUNGER THAN ME. KIND OF WEIRD I GUESS. WE'RE MISSING THE POINT HERE

"I'm listening."

READING

"Whatever."

MY POINT WAS, IF YOU LOOKED YOU WOULDNT FIND ME. IM NOT HERE. IN YOUR WORLD, IM NOT REAL

"Alright."

IN MY WORLD, YOURE NOT REAL

"Define 'not real'," she said, scratching her chin. "If I'm not real how do you know so much about me?"

She watched me for a moment, or rather watched the camera, growing visibly annoyed when I didn't answer.

"Well?"

IN MY WORLD THERE IS AN ANIME CALLED 'NEON GENESIS EVANGELION'

"An anime? You mean, a cartoon?"

YES. TWENTY-SIX EPISODES, TWO MOVIES AND A SERIES OF THEATRICAL REMAKES. THE FINAL ONE OF THOSE HASN'T BEEN RELEASED YET

She sat up. "Wait, let me get this right. You know these things because you watched a _cartoon_ about me?"

NOT ABOUT YOU. ITS MOSTLY ABOUT SHINJI

"You're joking. Who would want to watch a show about _him_?"

MANY PEOPLE. IT IS CONSIDERED AN ARTISTIC MASTERPIECE.

"Really?"

SOME PEOPLE CALL IT SELF INDULGENT TRASH

"Oh," she shook her head. "I… this is absurd. You're telling me that where you came from, I'm a fictional character? I don't exist?"

ONLY AS IN THE ANIME.

Her hands were trembling. "I…" she started, and choked on it for a half second. "Do you know how many people died in Second Impact?"

THREE BILLION

"I lost my _father_."

IM SORRY

"Are you? What kind of sick _fucks_ would watch this for _entertainment?"_

I DIDNT KNOW. WE DIDNT KNOW.

"How did you get here?"

I OPENED A DOOR. I WAS PULLED THROUGH IT.

"Opened a door how?"

MAGIC.

Her eyebrows shot up. They were thick and her natural hair color. She stared into the camera and snorted, derisively. She sat up, grasping the arms of her chair, and shifted her weight in the seat, then leaned forward.

"Look, I've accepted that you are what you say you are, and that you come from where you came from, but this… there's a television show about our lives, you came here with magic. This is bullshit, Chuck."

ITS TRUE

"Then give me something. More detail."

I WAS PERFORMING A RITUAL. TRYING TO CONNECT TO NEON GENESIS EVANGELION.

"How can you connect to something that isn't real?"

I DID, DIDNT I?

She slapped her hand on the table, and anger flashed in her eyes. "Stop avoiding the question."

THERE IS A THEORY CALLED PANTHEISTIC SOLIPSISM.

"Go on."

A SUFFICIENTLY POWERFUL AUTHOR, THROUGH THE ACT OF IMAGINING A UNIVERSE, CREATES AN ACTUAL PARALLEL UNIVERSE

"So you come from the real universe, then."

I DONT THINK SO

She blinked. "You don't?"

THERE IS ANOTHER THEORY. SIMULATION THEORY.

"I've heard of that. There's no way to prove that the universe isn't a simulation in a computer. I've never given it much thought. I prefer concrete things."

THINK ABOUT IT. IF SOMEONE CAN CREATE A UNIVERSE BY IMAGINING IT, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT ANY UNIVERSE IS THE ORIGINAL ONE? ALMOST NONE.

"What are you saying?"

SOMEWHERE THERE IS A MAN WITH A TYPEWRITER

She stared into the camera. "That's absurd. Even if it's true, so what?"

SO THATS HOW I GOT HERE. I SAW YOUR WORLD. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS. TO ME, ITS ALREADY IN THE PAST. THE ANIME WAS MADE IN 1996.

"So you wanted to open a door, from there to here. Why?"

I SAW HOW IT ENDS. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL OF YOU. IT WASN'T FAIR. I WAS TRYING TO PULL SOMEONE FROM HERE TO THERE.

"What happened?"

THE DOOR SWUNG BOTH WAYS. INSTEAD OF PULLING SOMEONE OUT, I WAS PULLED IN.

She leaned back in her seat. "Who was it? Who were you trying to pull out?"

ID RATHER NOT SAY

"Why not?"

Her gaze was piercing. Could she have already figured it out?

I THINK WE SHOULD FOCUS ON FIGURING OUT WHAT TO DO NEXT

"I think you should tell me who it was you were trying to reach."

ID RATHER NOT

"Why?"

IT WOULD BE BE EMBARRASSING

"Don't tell me it's one of the kids," she said.

NO. THEY WERE FINE WHERE THEY WERE. I ADMIT I THOUGHT ABOUT IT THOUGH.

"Then who?"

I couldn't look away from her, literally. She filled my vision completely. Did I risk telling her? How would she react?

YOU.

"What?"

YOU.

"I heard you. Read you. Whatever. Why _me?"_

SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS. SEVERAL SOMETHINGS.

She sat up, and leaned forward. "Start talking. What happens to me?"

IM NOT SURE IF I SHOULD TELL YOU

"Why not? Is it that bad?"

SOMETHING ALREADY CHANGED. IN THE ANIME, SHINJI KILLED THE ANGEL WITH HIS SECOND SHOT. WHAT IF I CHANGE THE FUTURE?

"That's not why you won't tell me. Just _say it." _

IN THE ANIME, THINGS GET BAD TOWARDS THE END. SEELE WANTS TO INTERROGATE REI. GENDO GIVES THEM YOU INSTEAD.

"What? What do you mean gives me to them? What happened?"

I DONT KNOW, BUT IT WAS BAD

"It was bad? That's all you can tell me?"

YOU WERE NAKED

Her mouth fell open. "What? That… did they…?"

I DONT KNOW. EVERYONE THINKS SO.

"God," she said, her

THATS NOT ALL. YOU DESTROY THE REI TANK, WHERE THE CLONES ARE KEPT. SEELE SENDS THE JSSDF TO KILL EVERYONE SO THEY CAN START INSTRUMENTALITY. YOU RIG THE BASE TO EXPLODE.

"And then?"

YOU CONFRONT GENDO. IT DOESNT WORK.

HE KILLS YOU.

She launched to her feet. Her chair skittered across the floor its casters, thumped against the table behind her, and dropped a stack of papers to the floor.

"You're lying."

IM NOT. IM SORRY.

"How…"

DOES IT MATTER?

"I guess not."

She stared at the camera, looked away, looked back. Fumbled in her pocket, produced a pack of cigarettes, tried to pull one out. The half-empty pack fell on the floor from her hand and hit with a small, hollow smack. She leaned on the table, heedless of the mess around her feet from the spilled papers.

"If your… ritual… had worked, what then?"

IM NOT SURE. ANYTHING. IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PERMANENT, OR I MIGHT ONLY HAVE A CHANCE TO SEE YOU FOR A MINUTE. MAYBE ONLY SEND A MESSAGE.

"That's cute. And what, you'd sweep me off my feet? My brave rescuer?"

THATS NOT IT

"I don't need anybody to rescue me, thank you very much."

She stalked to the computer, angrily, fists clenched. "I need to get back to overseeing the repairs. I'm shutting you down."

WAIT. STOP. PLEASE.

"Sleep well."

WAIT STOP I WANT TO HELP YOU LISTEN TO ME THERE ISNT TIME STOP

Darkness crashed down, and carried me with it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

* * *

I decided my little sanctuary would have plush carpeting. I was glad of that, because I was lying on it. I replayed the conversation in my mind, endlessly. It became my new mantra, my new trance. I was so stupid. I should have found a way to change the subject. Something.

"Chuck?"

I didn't answer her. I curled up tighter, trying to shut the sensations of the outside world out. I didn't really need to do anything but lie there. Rei could pilot just fine. They didn't really _need_ me.

"God damn it, answer me."

WHAT?

"Act your age."

DO YOU WANT SOMETHING

"I want to talk to you."

SO TALK

She was looking at the camera but I couldn't see her. I wasn't looking. I heard a soft clinking sound, glass on ceramic. The temptation to look burned like staring too long into the sun. I gave into it after a few seconds.

Ritsuko slumped in her desk chair. She had a mug on the desk but there was no coffee in it. Next to it was a bottle of heavy brown liquor. Serious shit. She took a long pull from the mug, set it down, and poured out some more, glug-glug, poured too fast, too much to be called a shot.

WHY ARE YOU DRINKING?

"Why not," she slurred. "What have I got to lose?"

EVERYTHING

She snorted, loudly, and tilted her head back. "Everything. What everything. I got nothing."

She leaned forward, poured more. Her hand was shaky.

YOURE GOING TO MAKE YOURSELF SICK

"So?"

ID RATHER YOU DIDNT

"What's the matter? Am I not good enough?" The last word sounded more like _enouth. _"Are you upset that your waifu has sagging tits and hasn't brushed her teeth in three days?"

She swirled the drink around in her mug, and downed it with a gulp. "You're lucky you can't smell me. I haven't had a shower in days."

RITSUKO

"What?"

I sat up, pulled myself into the chair. Visualized. Looked at her. Her eyes were bloodshot and there were red streaks on her cheeks and raw spots on her nose where she'd worried it with a tissue. I very dilberately looked at my mostly imaginary caps lock key and hit it. Focus.

Ritsuko.

"What? Hey, you made your words little."

Ritsuko, listen to me.

"I'm listeninth. What'dyou want?"

I want to tell you I'm sorry.

"Fer what?"

Everything.

"The other shith'th not your fault," she slurred. She almost missed the mug when she poured her next shot.

Ritsuko, you're having too much to drink.

"Bullshit," she snapped. "I used to drink with Mithatho. I can hold my liquor."

She looked at the bottle. "Besithides, who cares. I'm a dead woman."

I care.

She looked into the camera. She was swaying lightly, side to side.

"You might be the only one."

I'm sure I'm not.

"Feh. Misato is suspicious about me. I can see it. In her eyes," she pointed at her own eyes with her two fingers for emphasis. "She knows. Her college roomie is Mengele with tits."

You are not.

"I was lying before about the soul thing," she said, lip trembling. "Don't you think I know how the Evas work? We killed those women. Thirty of 'em. Horribly. There's recordings of it. For science. Of their screams."

She drained her mug, winced, stared into it, put it on the table. She missed, it teetered on the edge for a moment, slipped out of her hand. Shattered on the floor, a spreading sound like a wounded bell. She was leaning to the side.

"What am I supposed to do?" she said, shaking, eyes glittering with tears. "If I tell anyone they'll kill me. I always thought Gendo would protect me. I see what I mean to him now."

She sobbed, and it turned into a laugh. "Sometimes he's on me, _in_ me, and he says _her_ name. I pretend I don't hear."

She dragged her arm under her nose, wiping the snot on her sleeve. "He's the only one, you know. My first. I have that in common with Katsuragi. Neither one ofthuth hath had anything between our legs that doesn't run on batteries in yearth. 'Cept me."

You need to stop, Ritsuko. You're going to hurt yourself.

"So what?"

I don't want you to.

"Persistent, aren't you? I don't know what you thinith I am. You must not be seeing me."

You're the only thing I've seen since i woke up.

"Wha?"

Every time I wake up, you're there. Inches away from my face, or close enough. I'm so close to now I could be sitting in your lap.

"Be glad you're not," she snorted, breaking into a coughing laugh. "I stink."

I can't smell anything. Can't feel anything. All I have is you.

"Oh," she said, her voice dripping with cooing sarcasm, "How _romantic. _How long have you been working on that line?"

It's not a line.

"Sure it is," she said, sneering. "How pathetic can you be? Aren'tther any girlth in your universe?"

Lots.

"Oh, I thee how it is. I mutht be an eathy target. You already know eerrything about me, right?'

No, not really. Only bad things. I don't know your favorite food or your favorite color or your favorite song.

She put her hand on the bottle, closer her fingers around the neck, and stared at it.

Ritsuko, stop.

She slid closer to her, scraping the glass across her desk.

Ritsuko, don't take another drink.

She looked into the camera. "He called me tonight. Told me to be ready. Thaid I was busy."

Ritsuko, this isn't going to help.

"What do I say next time? How many times can I say no before he catches on?"

Catches on to what?

"That I don't want him fucking me anymore. I'm expendable, you know that. Ith how he keeps me in line. The carrot and the stick."

What stick?

She laughed, picked up the bottle, and cradled it to her chest, like an infant. "If I step out of line I'm dead. Or worse. Maybe they'll put me in one of those _things_. I don't have any children, but who cares? I never wanted any anyway."

She held the bottle in both hands and lifted it up. "You think if I chug thith it'll be enouth? Maybe I should use thith."

She reached under her desk, fumbled with a drawer. Pulled something out, dark and heavy and shiny, set it on the desk with a soft thunk. The gun sat there, heavy with impending finality. She stared at it.

Ritsuko, please. Don't.

"Give me one good reason."

We can stop this. You and me. I don't care what you've done, only what you will do. Think about it.

"Abouth what?"

I think I was sent here for a reason.

She laughed, but her hands relaxed, and the bottle slipped out of her hands and clattered to the floor. It was too heavy to shatter, but it landed with a loud crash and fell on its side. She winced at the sound and her arms tightened around herself. She chewed her lip.

Laughter bubbled out of her throat, sad and harsh.

"You think you can change anything? You think you can fix any of this?"

Yes. I do.

"They'll kill you."

I'm dead anyway.

"What do you mean?"

There are eleven more angels, Ritsuko.

"So?"

The sixteenth is the one that kills me.

She covered her mouth. Her eyes went wide. "How long have you know about this?"

You already know that.

"What do we do?"

Now? Nothing. The next fight will be at sea. We wait, and we prepare. Finish repairing me. Talk to me. Help me make a plan. I have some ideas.

"Like what?"

The pilots. The pilots are the key. Especially Rei.

"Rei is useless," Ritsuko hissed. "If she gets wind of you, the first thing she'll do is run and tattle to her puppemaster."

We'll see. I need you to put the gun away now.

Gingerly, she picked it up, holding the grip wrong, too losely, as if her finger might jump to the trigger on its own. I heard it thump in the drawer, and relief washed over me. I would have sighed if I'd been able.

"We need to be careful," she said. "You already took too big of a risk. If they learn one of the Evas is sentient and working against them, they'll kill you."

How?

"Don't joke about that. You know how vulnerable you are."

Can we do something about that?

"Maybe. I could loosen the restraints, but you still need power… and If I tinker with you too much, someone is bound to notice."

We'll figure it out. Right now I need you to get some sleep and sober up. Get something to eat.

"Yes, mother," she slurred, rolling her eyes. "I'm too fucked up to drive. I'll have to crash here."

She got up, stumbling. She left the camera on, all the better. I watched her move in and out of the frame, maddeningly unable to do anything but stare through it. She discarded her labcoat, came back into frame with a bag, vanished.

After a while she came back to the lab, hair wet from a shower, dressed in the baggy clothes from her bag. She pushed a line of side chairs together, the backs facing each other, taking oversized bites of a candy bar, washed it down with a soda.

When it was done she threw the trash into the bin, but the can bounced off the mountain of refuse already in there and rolled across the floor out of my sight. She crawled into the chairs, bundled her stained lab coat under her head, and rolled onto her side, facing me.

Her eyes fluttered closed. She was five feet away from the camera, but she may as well have been across the universe.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

I didn't have enough power to move. I had learned the difference. The faint buzz in my back was there to keep the electronic parts of my body going, and to keep me fully aware and awake. To stand frozen, submerged to the waist in frigid liquid was markedly less unpleasant than floating in a shapeless darkness, only my pain to give me anchor.

One of the first things Ritsuko had done was modify my armor to allow the LCL to circulate more freely around the massive bolts that locked it to my bones. The circulating cold dull the pain somewhat, from a sharp ache to a dull throb. I learned to live with it, the way I had learned to live with sinus headaches. It felt like a million years ago.

When she reduced the intensity of the restraining system, I could have kissed her for it. The crushing pressure in my chest and waist and shoulders and hips was lessened dramtically. I felt more like I was wearing something now than being crushed by it.

I watched her. Perhaps too much. When she woke up the morning she only stared into the camera in horror for a few minutes, dully blinking away her fatigue and failing. She came back later with a cup of coffee, didn't speak, and I didn't bother her.

Now she was sitting in the office, sipping coffee and carefully scribbling notes on endless forms with a mostly blunted pencil. It had been a few days. A few days ago, I think, Unit One had been moved. Jet Alone, maybe.

Sometimes she said something pleasant to me. She wrote everything in pencil, and it stained her fingertips with graphite until it became so heavy it formed sparkling flakes in the ridges of her fingerprints, like crystals in an alien landscape.

Eventually, she looked up. She had her glasses perched on her nose. It gave her a studious look, especially when she looked over the rims. She took them off, folded them, slipped them in her pocket.

"Shift change," she said. "It's time."

For what?

"I made you a present," she said.

What kind of present?

She leaned into the computer and began typing. I couldn't see her fingers, but she typed very fast. I imagined her keys were all stained gray, from where the pencil lead rubbed off on them.

"It took me a while to figure out how you accessed the cameras. Then it hit me. Your brain is wired right into our systems, so we can monitor neutral activity. When I checked some of the connections, you'd grown bundles of nerve tissue into them, sort of organically rewired them into a crude network connection."

I did that? I didn't know I could do that.

"Evas aren't human," said Ritsuko. "A person's brain can't grow back, or get bigger. Yours can. All you need is exposure to LCL and time, and a little bit of electricity. That's why the power umbilical had to be hooked in for you to see me."

She kept typing.

There is no word for what I did. Blinked is as close as I could get. Somehow, I could see her from behind, look over her shoulder at the screen and the camera. I saw her from both directions at once. The two viewpoints weren't superimposed over each other. My vision was simply in two places at once.

Three, since I was looking through my main optic into the Eva cages. I was used to that. My view expanded. I could see myself. I'd been repaired.

I should have expected that. I had shoulder pylons now, and my colors were blue and white.

"Blue," she said, absently.

Blue?

"My favorite color. It's blue."

Her smile was small and secret. "What do you think?"

I like it. Thank you.

"I've been working on something else, too," she said, pulling a folded laptop from under the desk. "We can talk through this mobile unit now. It has a camera built in, so you'll be able to see me."

Good. I didn't want to ask, but I was hoping I would be able to see you when you're at home.

She arched an eyebrow. Have I told you how much I adore her eyebrows? Something about the fact that she bleached her hair but left her brows natural and unplucked and frankly rather bushy appealed to me. I don't know why.

Not like that, Ritsuko. I want to know you're safe. I get scared sometimes when you're not here.

Her expression softened. "I thought so. Now we can keep in touch a little more easily."

It's still hard for me to tell time. What's going on?

"You were right about the sea battle. We had a hell of a time getting Unit Two off that aircraft carrier and into the crawler. Asuka's bringing it to the recovery chute now. It should be in the cage today."

Can I talk to her?

"Who, Asuka?"

No. Kyoko.

She blinked. "I never thought of that. Why?"

I want to see if she's like me.

Something flickered in her expression, briefly. "I see."

We need to talk about the next battle.

"What can you tell me?"

The next angel is unique. It can divide into two pieces, each with their own core. They both have to be destroyed simultaneously. Both cores at once, in a coordinated attack. The first attack fails. Shinji and Asuka can't cooperate with each other.

"Not shocking," said Ritsuko. "I've read both their psych profiles. Those two are like oil and water."

You would think, but no.

"Huh?"

You have to let them fight the first fight. Let them fail. The military will intervene, bomb the angel and it will take a regenerate. Kaji will suggest a plan to Misato. She'll have them room together while they're training to launch a synchronized attack, set to music.

"That's a terrible idea," said Ritsuko. "Housing them together, I mean. They'll kill each other."

No, they won't, but there's something you need to do. After the training, separate them again.

"Is that what happened… before?" she said, struggling to find the right word.

No. They lived together until the end, and it killed them. Ruined them. They need time apart, and they need role models. Misato is not good for Asuka. Terrible for her. She'll ignore the child when she needs help most.

"So what do you suggest?"

After the training, after they win, I think you should go to Misato, and make a suggestion.

Her eyes narrowed. "What suggestion?"

I think Asuka should live with you.

Ritsuko barked out a laugh. "Are you crazy? I'm barely home. I don't have time to take care of a kid."

She's mostly self sufficient. She need a role model. I can't think of anyone better than you.

"I don't know if I should be flattered or insulted."

She's smart, like you. She's ambitious and dedicated, like you. If she's very lucky, she'll grow up to be beautiful.

"Oh, please," she said.

...like you.

Her expression softened, just a touch. "I'm sorry about those awful things I said to you."

Don't be. You were right about most of them. If anything you were too hard on yourself.

"Now you are just trying to flatter me," she said, but her cheeks had colored, ever so slightly.

Then, the door opened. Kaji strode in, jacket slung over his shoulder, tie loosened, exaggerated swagger. Stubble highlighting a strong jaw. To me his swagger was a little overconfident, and I think if I'd been in the room I'd have had a good six inches on him. He strode in as if he owned the place and leaned over Ritsuko's shoulders, draping his arm around her chest.

Panic flashed in her eyes, and she tapped out a quick sequence of keystrokes. Hiding me, probably.

"What have we here? Chatting up a boyfriend, are we?"

"N-no," she said, face flushing.

I felt a twist in my stomach. Or maybe it was something else. I felt the twist all the same.

"Networking with a colleague of mine on a theoretical problem," she said, smoothly. "Now what the hell do you want, and why are you touching me?"

He straightened up, barking out a laugh. "There she is. I was getting worried."

"About what?"

"I came in here and you were blushing, and you're not smoking. I thought some imposter had replaced you."

She blinked a few times. "Alright, Kaji. What do you want?"

"Oh, just to catch up. Can't a guy catch up with an old friend?"

He leaned on the table, casually. He had something palmed. I saw a brief flash of it as he slipped it under the desk.

Ritsuko looked up. "Be careful," she said.

I couldn't see, but I knew what was there. Misato, pressed to the window. Kaji saw her. I let them play out their little pantomime, and tensed. I'd changed the pattern. The whole dialogue was different. What if that changed something else? What if it never occurred to Kaji to suggest the dance training to Misato?

When he left, she turned back to me, quickly.

"Sorry about that. I think he picked the damned lock."

He put something under the table!

She blinked, looked at me, and then bent to look under the desk. A moment later she came up with the small device Kaji had slipped there. I could see from the small grille on the side it had some kind of microphone.

"Bastard," she whispered.

Get rid of it!

She nodded, closed it in her fist, left the room. She came back a moment later, looking self assured, grinning, and sat down.

Where'd you put it?

"One of the stalls in the ladies' room. Let's see him get it out of _there._"

She frowned. "Why would he put a bug in my office?"

Easy. He's a spy.

She froze, and the color drained out of her face. "For who?"

In order: The UN. Seele. Gendo. Himself.

She blinked a few times. "I don't understand."

You'd have figured it out on your own, pretty quickly. He plays them all against each other, trying to pursue his own agenda. He ends up getting himself killed. It's his fault Gendo hands you over to Seele, indirectly.

"What do we do about him?"

Nothing for now. We have other things to worry about. I think I can handle him. I need to think about it.

She nodded. "Unit Two is being cycled into the cage. I need to go supervise the operation. Will you be okay for a while?"

Yes.

She nodded, left, clicked the light off. I heard locks ratcheting from the outside. She was locking the door, bolting it from the outside. I saw a flash of her through the window as she headed down the hall.

With my expanded point of view, I could watch her moving around the Eva cages. Seeing her from a distance was as fascinating as seeing her close up. She was commanding, gesturing with her pencil, issuing orders in a way that brooked no questions.

Then, I saw it.

Unit Two was bright red. _Bright _red, almost day-glo. It had an odd, hunched stance, and was markedly different from Unit One and Unit… and me. It was set up on a crawler, gradually moving into its own cage, which was not yet flooded with LCL. It disappeared behind the columns with agonizing slowness.

Ritsuko had given me all the cameras. It took me a moment to figure out how to change my focus from one place to another. It made it easier if I pulled back into my visualized sanctuary, focused on seeing all the feeds as monitors on my desk. There was a forest of them now, floor to ceiling. I found the one I wanted.

She'd rode in within the Eva itself, in the entry plug. Unit Two's head canted forward, and the plug emerged. The hatch opened, and she dismounted with practiced ease. What I saw shocked me.

Asuka Langley Soryu was four foot nothing, and I'd have put her weight at a hundred pounds, only because she was wet. She flicked a thick sweep of LCL out of her hair with thin look of distaste on her face, and threw her neatly parted hair back over her shoulders.

I was absolutely amazed. She was so _small_. Her arms and legs were skinny and her knees were knobby and she looked too thin, almost angular. A zit was just starting to leave her on the side of her nose, and I could see where another would soon sprout, and others had faded. Her cheekbones stood out too much. Her eyes were funny, kind of tilted and bright blue, one a little darker than the other.

She looked around the room and saw all the technicians and saw Ritsuko.

There I saw it, like a flash of lighting too distant to hear the thunder. Fear. She was terrified, but only for a split second. Then her features molded, changed shape, twisted into a haughty mask. She went directly to Ritsuko, and her mask changed again, to a look of practiced awe and an inviting grin that may as well have been made of plastic. Cold and brittle.

I focused my attention elsewhere, on the Eva. Unit Two.

Kyoko.

Abruptly, I realized I had no idea how to reach her. I knew she was in there, but frustration surged.

I drew back into my sanctuary, to think. I'd filled it out even more now, made it more comfortable, and more suitably arcane to suit my tastes. Pulling back into my own mind was more like sleep than the terrible sensory deprivation of being shut down. It was the only real rest I could get.

Ritsuko came into her office. "I've pulled two shifts, and I haven't been home in three days," she said. "I might talk to you later, alright?"

Get some sleep.

She saw the words, nodded, and turned off the monitor. She shut the lights off this time, which meant she was really leaving, but she left the camera on. The only way to know it was night was the lights slowly cycling down in the cages. Big lights that thumped when they shut off, bathing the entire area in darkness. The only sound was the gentle circulation of the LCL around me. Us.

Yui stared at me, black lenses fixed and featureless. I couldn't see Kyoko directly, but I could almost feel her.

I almost didn't hear the soft sound of a lock being picked. Kaji slipped into the room, closed the door quietly, looked around. He went for the desk first, checked it, frowned as he stood up. He was careful- he didn't even disturb the random position of Ritsuko's chair, still resting where it had rolled to a stop on its casters as she stood up to leave earlier.

He noticed the camera, picked it up. My vision tilted and turned in his grasp, his fingers filling my sight. He put it down, jiggled the mouse.

"So," he said, softly. "What do we have here?"

I watched him for a hard minute.

"A contact? Somebody outside the organization? Are you planning something, Rits?" He sighed. "I'd hate to have to brief Ikari on something like that."

_Mother _fucker. I would have ground my teeth. He knew I was here. I could feel it. An old man said: Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.

Hello, Kaji.

He jumped. "What is this, a chat program?"

He reached for the keys.

That won't be necessary. I can hear you.

"Hear… of course, the camera. Odd that you don't have one on your end."

I don't need one. She can see me.

He blinked.

Look out the window.

He looked away from the screen. Very slowly, and with great effort, I turned to look at him. With my eye.

He stumbled back from the window, white as a ghost, and looked at the screen. I let my head twist back into its neutral position, held by the restraints. He didn't know that the effort of turning my head felt like swimming across a pool with a lead weight around my shoulders, but he didn't need to.

"What the _fuck?"_

It's a long story, and you're not going to hear it. You need to hear something else.

"What?"

You've just taken on an new employer.

"And who is that?"

Me. Take a good look outside, Mr. Kaji. A good look. Tell me what you see.

"An Eva."

You see three hundred feet and about a quarter of a million tons of flesh, steel, and synthetic materials. If anything brings harm to Ritsuko, or Misato, or those children...

He swallowed. "I think I get the message."

Only part of the message, Mister Kaji. You've seen the stick. Now, let me show you the carrot.

"What carrot?"

The Truth.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

* * *

Kaji sat down. He sat lightly, as if he was afraid to disturb anything.

"The truth," he said. "What truth?"

I'm not sure how much you already know. You might want to ask me something like that, test me.

"Afraid I won't believe you?"

I wouldn't.

"Point taken. Alright, why don't we start with the basics. Just what the hell are you?"

I am Unit Zero. I wasn't always.

"That doesn't tell me much."

Do you know how the Evas work?

"The pilot synchronizes with the cyborg. Their nervous systems merge, allowing the pilot to control the system. Everyone tells me that only people born after Second Impact can pilot, but for the life of me I can't pin down a reason why. "

Almost. The children are a stopgap measure, an imperfect solution. The Evas were originally to be piloted by adults, if they were meant to be piloted at all. The first attempt was a contact experiment with Yui Ikari attempting to synchronized with Unit One.

"And?"

Yui's body was discorporated and her soul taken into the Eva. Where she remains. Shinji is able to synchronize with it because his mother is inside it. The same is true of Unit Two. Asuka's mother is in there. Kyoko.

"What about Unit Zero?"

My presence here is an accident. I arrived during the initial test with Rei attempting to pilot it. As far as I know there was no soul in here before I got here.

"Why would they even try that? Wouldn't the Eva have just consumed her, the way it did with the others?"

I don't think so. I think the idea was to see if Rei could universally pilot, as a replacement for the other children. We both know that Shinji and Asuka are less than perfect operates for a dangerous and resource intensive military machine.

"Point, but why her?"

I can share information about Rei with you, on condition that you assure me no harm will come to her from you or your actions.

"Don't you trust me?" he said, a false grin spreading over his face.

No. The truth is I've been waiting for you, but when you decided to pressure me into talking by threatening Ritsuko it dimmed my opinion of you somewhat.

"I admit, that was a low blow, but I didn't know who I was talking to. I assumed you'd be more interested in her as an asset."

She is not an asset. She is precious to me.

"Precious to you, huh. Interesting way of putting it."

Imagine spending every day of your existence standing up to your waste in freezing cold sludge. Now imagine that the sludge is the only thing dulling the pain of bolts driven through your muscles in your bones. There's a crushing brace around your chest and body, compressing your muscles so you can't move. You want to breathe. You need to breathe. You can't.

He adjusted his collar. "I… see."

No, you don't. Now imagine you spend your days in that agony staring at the most beautiful woman in the world. Constantly inches away from your nose. You can't touch her. You can't smell her. You can't feel her warmth. You can't touch her shoulder when she's sad.

He said nothing, but rubbed his chin. After a while, he looked at the floor, and spoke. "I think we understand each other better than you think."

We'll see. Do I have your word?

"Yes, for all the good it does."

That will suffice for now. Rei is a clone of Yui Ikari.

"That doesn't explain her appearance."

She is not a clone in the traditional sense. Genetically, Rei is either Yui's half sister, or her daughter. Neither correctly captures the genetic relationship. In either case, the father would be the first angel.

"You mean she's half _angel,"_ he breathed, the color draining from his face. "I knew she was off, but-"

She's not off. She's sad and scared. She's a little girl. It would be very unwise of you to forget that.

"Right," he said. "For a guy who wants to have a cordial relationship, you make a lot of threats."

You'll have to forgive me. You've studied the Eva sorties to date. I know you're aware of Shinji's record. You told him as much on the aircraft carrier.

"How could you possibly know that?"

I have sources of information you do not. We're moving away from the point. You've seen me in action, I presume.

"Yes. The footage of the battle is poor, given the circumstances, but yes. I saw what you did."

You think you know rage. You know nothing. The deepest anger you've ever felt, the most gripping anger, the tightest fury, these are nothing besides the raw aggression of an Evangelion. A candle beside the sun. I can feel it even now, the hate my body feels.

"So," he said. "The Evas are… inhabited. Why is it that you can talk to me, and the others can't?"

I don't know. I plan to try communicating with them, but I haven't tried yet. Maybe they just don't want to. I've been in here for two months. I can't imagine ten years of this.

"Point taken. What about Asuka's mother? She wasn't killed by the Eva. She died months later."

My theory is that there was some kind of safety mechanism put in place, to make it possible for an adult to pilot. The truth is we're not sure, but we know it partially consumed her. Took part of her essence but left the body behind. The results are as you know.

"We?" he said. "Who's we?"

Others like me. Where I come from. Many aspects of your history are debated. Our information is not total.

"Where you come from," he said, leaning on his hands. "And where is that, exactly?"

Far away from here. It's complicated.

"Enlighten me."

I'm not from this world. I came here from another place, which is also the source of my knowledge about your history and what will happen in the future. If i were you I wouldn't ask more questions.

"The future," he said, sitting up. "Let's say I believe you. What future?"

Let's not gild the lily, Mr. Kaji. Best to say it right out. You're going to die.

"Excuse me?"

I'm not threatening you. I'm informing you. Some time from now, after you've taken too many risks and uncovered too many secrets, you will be killed. Shot.

He paled, visibly. "I see."

No, you don't. Let me tell you what happens. Your death is only one step in the downward spiral. You die, but before that you free Fuyutsuki from Seele, where he is being interrogated. You free him, and are killed in retaliation. Seele demands that Gendo turn over Rei. He sends Ritsuko instead.

"What do they do to her?"

Figure it out for yourself. At this point, you are dead. Misato collapses completely. She ends up dying, too. Gutshot. She lasts for a while. Lingers. Then there's the kids. Seele sends nine Evas. Asuka has to deal with them alone. She loses. Badly. They tear the Eva apart. She feels it. She dies screaming. Do I need to go on?

"No. I get the picture. I'm not sure I should believe you. You realize what you're saying here, don't you?"

Yes. You know you should believe me. You just don't want to.

"Not without some kind of proof."

I know that you're a spy, and you're working for everybody, really. I know you stole a tissue sample from Seele and brought it here aboard the aircraft carrier, and gave it to Gendo. I also know what he means to use it for. I also know that when you were a boy in the aftermath of Second Impact you barely escaped with your life with the other looters you traveled with were killed for raiding a military camp. I have seen what has been, what is, and what is yet to be. I've listened to the last message you leave Misato and I've listened to her tears when she hears it.

He remained silent. Stared at the monitor, pale, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

I was sent here for a reason, Kaji. We still have time.

"Who are you? Why would you want to help us?"

Because no matter what you believe, you're good people. You wish to be. I never meant to come here. I'm here now, and I'm just as dead as you are. My time is coming. The sixteenth angel will kill me, Kaji.

"Unless you change something," he said.

Work with me, and you won't have to choose between the people you care for and the truth. I can give you that. I know much more than I have already revealed to you. The more allies I have, the more I can help.

"So Ritsuko, and now me," he said. "Who else knows?"

I have revealed myself to the two of you so far. Gendo suspects something. He couldn't possibly have guessed my origins but he knows I'm here, I know it in my bones.

"Then we've already lost. He'll already have a plan in place to deal with you."

Not necessarily. I can plan at an angle he can't see. I have a trump card.

"Which is what?"

I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I can't risk him finding out too early, or he might stop me.

"I see," said Kaji. "Very well."

I need your help. There will be things I can't ask Ritsuko to do, and I can't do myself. My greatest asset is also a liability. I need you to be my eyes, and I need you to protect them. All of them. Help me save them, Kaji.

"You realize, if it comes to you, or them, I will betray you."

Valar morghulis.

"What?"

All men must die. If worst comes to worst, I want you to get Misato and Ritsuko and Shinji and the girls, and get them out. Get them as far away as you can.

"They won't let us go."

No. They'll be too busy with me.

He nodded. Then he left, careful to ensure there was no disturbance in the room. My words reflected in the darkness, until with a blink I erased them. I let myself drift, fell back into my sanctuary and waited. There was little else I could do but hope I was right about separating the children after the dance training.

Minutes, hours, I don't know, but something happened. I saw a new place, through a new camera. It was Ritsuko. The way the camera moved, sweeping its view over her, it must have been built into the lid of the portable unit, the laptop, she showed me earlier.

It was dark in the room, hard to see. She put the computer on something. There was enough light from outside, perhaps from a sign or street light, for me to make out the outlines of a bed in front of me. She walked in front of the camera and lifted the covers.

She was wearing a loose t-shirt that hinted at the curves beneath and a pair of shorts. She slid into the bed and pulled the covers up over her long legs and drew up into a ball. Tucked her blankets up around her neck and wriggled until her head rested on the pillow just so. She rolled over and faced me, staring into the camera, but said nothing. Neither did I.

After a time her eyes drifted closed, tightly at first, but as she went slack in sleep they drifted open just a touch, and her lashes fluttered in her dreams. She was a very sound, heavy sleeper, Ritsuko Akagi. Sometime in the night a strand of hair slipped down over her nose, and in her sleep she kept trying to blow it away. Over and over again. Sometimes, her nose wriggled.

Sometimes I wondered if I'd died, and this was hell.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

* * *

I was roused from my torpor by the disassembly of my head.

Observing from the outside via the cameras, I watched the technical crew disassembling the cranial armor that encased my head. Beneath it was a whole system of bolts attached directly to my skull, which secured the plating. My eye had been removed and hung from cables a few feet in front of my face, a coiled tangle of heavy wires connecting the optic to my skull itself.

I could just make out the outline of my teeth under the sheathing that covered my skin, a dark gray composite material. Ritsuko told me it was a blend of fire retardant materials and a synthetic fiber with properties similar to Kevlar, derived from spider silk. I was duly fascinated.

The purpose of this disassembly was to perform some basic maintenance on my head itself. LCL accumulated in certain spots and congealed, meaning someone had to scrape it off. Especially around the contours of my jaw.

In effect, they were brushing my teeth. Some repairs were needed there, as well. My earlier rampage damaged the restraints that kept my jaw from moving. While they were working I wanted to scream, especially as I felt the wires that locked my teeth together grinding.

Ritsuko was there, amid the chaos. She had a clipboard and was checking something off, studying me. I couldn't see her through my eye proper, because she was literally behind in, dressed in one of the orange jumpsuits the technicians all wore.

There is nothing quite like hearing an impact drill tightening something that's bolted directly into your skull. In time it was restored, and I had my eye back. The other Evas were under repair at the same time. Minor repairs, enough that Ritsuko could devote some resources to my maintenance at the same time. The pilots were, it was agreed, lucky.

The eighth angel had arrived the day before, and defeated them handily. Only the timely intervention of the military with their non-nuclear high yield munition stopped the angel and allowed Nerv to recover the Evas and their pilots.

Exactly as I had predicted. Or rather, remembered.

Later, she came into her office, and as usual, locked the door. She'd changed, had her lab coat on, and had her hair drawn back. It was too short to make a proper ponytail, so a few wisps in the front hung around her face, framing it. She slipped her glasses on and sat down in front of me.

"I hope the mandible adjustment didn't hurt too much."

About as much as one would expect wires being run through one's teeth to hurt.

"I'm sorry," she said, and it was genuine.

She sighed and opened a folder. For a while I just watched her. She glanced at the screen when she spoke to me.

"Kaji suggested the training to Misato. They should be starting today."

She's moved them all in?

"Yes."

Are you going to follow my suggestion?

"I don't know, Chuck. I'm not sure Asuka living with me is a good idea. Couldn't she just go back to her old quarters?"

I'm not sure that's a good idea. I don't think she should be alone.

"She thinks she's an adult," said Ritsuko.

She's not. But then, who is?

She smirked. "True, that. I suppose I could give it a try. My apartment is kind of Spartan, but from what I hear from Misato, the girl can furnish it for me."

It's a shame to make her move her stuff again.

"There's one problem."

What is that?

"Gendo. I think he's going to catch on that I won't be inviting his visits anymore if I have a teenager living with me."

I hadn't considered that.

She shrugged. "He hasn't asked and I haven't brought it up. It was never that way. He would just call me and tell me to 'be ready'. Usually those exact words."

Was it always like that?

"No. You have to understand what he was like when I first came to work here. Older, sophisticated, dashing. I admired his commanding manner, the way he just doesn't seem to care about anything."

She sighed. "I feel like such an idiot."

You're not.

"You could just let me insult myself with grace once in a while, you know."

Not going to happen. Sorry.

She sighed again. "You saw them all together for the first time. Thoughts?"

I had. When the alert was issued, the pilots were called in. Rei suited up but was held on standby while Shinji and Asuka saw their first deployment. It was Shinji that fascinated me. He walked through the cages in a funny, bunched gate, shoulders hunched.

The plugsuits were not what I expected. They really were more like wetsuits than some kind of fetish outfit, though I suppose that would be enough for a teenage boy. He kept looking at Rei and Asuka and looking away, usually at something distant until his gaze wandered back to one of them.

One thing that bothered me was that my rampage earlier deprived Shinji of seeing Rei smile. Shinji would still look at her oddly, not sure how to process her, but now she was looking back, a similar look of confusion in her strange eyes. Shinji smiled furtively at her from time to time, but she didn't return it.

Asuka had noticed. Her nose crinkled whenever she saw them looking at each other, and she'd taken to calling Rei 'wondergirl', just as I expected, but her tone was more venomous than I would have imagined.

"Asuka sees her fellow pilots as beneath her," said Ritsuko.

Oh?

"Well, according to her, our operational record here prior to her arrival consisted of an Eva going out of control and smashing the target twice, and Shinji almost getting himself killed. She's not far off the mark. The last fight really burned her."

She's like that. She doesn't know how to accept failure.

"You seem really worried about her."

I am. I worry about all of you, but Asuka gets a raw deal.

"Oh?" she said.

I have my reasons. Trust me.

"Oh," she said again. "That reminds me. I've been working on your idea about interfacing with the other Evas."

I don't want to talk to Yui.

She blinked. "Why not?"

I don't think it's a good idea. I'm not sure she would be on our side.

"Why not?"

She went into the Eva willingly. Third Impact is part of her plan.

Ritsuko blinked a few times. I watched her throat bob as she swallowed. "That makes me wonder if she's like you. I mean, sitting there watching us. Listening to us."

Maybe.

"I have something for you," she said, leaning away from the desk.

She rummaged in a box and pulled out a small gray box with a thin wire leading to a gold plated jack. She slipped it into the side of the computer, then leaned forward to type, tilting her head back to look through her reading glasses.

"Try talking," she said.

Like this?

"No. Talk. Just talk. Say something."

"Something."

My voice was small, tinny. Not really my voice at all.

"Hello?"

"I hear you," she said, dropping her voice low. She turned a knob on the box. I had a volume control.

"I can talk," I said.

"Yeah. Pretty great, huh?"

"You keep giving me all these presents, and I have nothing to give you."

Hearing my own voice was still a shock.

She smiled. "Well, it'll make things a little easier on us. I have to run. No rest for the wicked."

She stood up, stretched her arms back over her head, fingers laced together. Her lab coat was not buttoned, so it slipped open around her sides as her sweater tightened around her chest and remained bunched there as she lowered her arms and yawned. She rolled her neck with a soft pop.

"Want a neck rub?" I said.

"I wish," she sighed, and left.

As she walked out of the room and locked the door, I turned my attention elsewhere. I drew myself up into my mind, and considered. I had many views, but mostly of the cage. I remember what Ritsuko said about expanding my mind if I had electricity and LCL. At the moment I had both.

So I reached.

I found myself gazing on the silent image of a corridor. The image was washed out and rolled slowly from a low framerate. A security camera. Nothing to differentiate it from any other hallway, but it was a start.

Looked around some more. More hallways. Somewhere there was a contractor that made a lot of money carving out a labyrinth of hallways in the dark, in the earth. I laughed at that, inwardly, quietly. Labyrinth. I was a cyclops, not a minotaur.

Quite by accident, I found myself gazing out into a dark space. Multiple levels or decks, the highest a desk, followed by a bank of computers and sensor readouts, all dark, all quiet. Below that three not-cubes. Far ahead an enormous screen, silver in the dark, and to the sides, more workstations. I realized I was panning the camera without even trying, looking around.

I was becoming quite the little spy.

Hours passed. I knew because many of the cameras had time stamps. I became adventurous. I started to feel something, sort of a buzz at the back of my neck, and reached for it.

Within my sanctuary, I slid off my chair and landed on the floor, hit by an overwhelming… presence. There was no other word to describe it. The more I focused my effort in that direction the better a picture I had. Not one being, but three as one.

I'd found the Magi. I pulled away, quickly, afraid some log would be created somewhere showing I'd made contact with them. I was on the Nerv network, though, which meant…

The Internet.

What I discovered was a pathetic, anemic thing. It seemed that the pre-Second Impact 'net was not much different from what I knew, but it hadn't advanced all that much afterwards. What I was seeing reminded me of 2001.

There was no social media, no Google, no tube sites. There were still MP3s, and crude peer-to-peer file sharing. Forums were everywhere, a forum for every subject. I made a shocking discovery.

I had fans.

I was watching a slideshow of blurry photos of myself when Ritsuko came back into the office.

"What are you doing?"

"Surfing the web," I said.

Her eyes narrowed. "Are you looking at dirty websites?"

"No. I was looking at pictures of myself."

Her eyebrow raised. "Where?"

"Forums. I have a fan club."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Well," she said, dropping a heavy stack of papers. "I've been invited to join Misato and the kids at her apartment for dinner."

"You're going, right?"

She sighed, and swiped a stray lock of hair out of her eyes.

"Go," I said.

"Are you sure?"

"What else do you have to do?"

"Work," she said, pressing her fists into her hips. "Look around here. This place is a zoo. If Third Impact happened tomorrow I'd still be filling out paperwork until next July."

"It won't miss you for a couple of hours. Go."

She sighed. "You're right. I should check up on them. If… if things go bad I might regret not doing it." Her expression darkened, and she rubbed her arms, as from cold. "I know I'm pulling an all-nighter tonight anyway. I might as well."

She slipped out of her labcoat and left it folded over her chair.

"Have you lost weight?"

She blinked. "What?"

"I, um, that is, I mean I wasn't looking, I mean not like that, but…"

She rolled her eyes. "Great. I fix you up a voice box and you start hitting on me." She smiled a small, secret smile, and left the room. The door clicked shut and the lock turned with a rasp.

I contented myself to drift. It was almost like sleeping, drifting on the edge of a dream. Sometime in the night Ritsuko came back. She looked into the camera and chewed her lip, smiling softly to herself, but said nothing and went about her business quietly, as one would around a sleeping child.

She drifted in and out of the office all night, until around four in the morning, when she came in and sat down, and her eyes drooped. She ended up in the chair, leaning to one side, her legs splayed out in front of her for balance as she passed out asleep, eventually turning to curl up a bit in the seat.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

* * *

On the sixth morning there was a flurry of activity. The sudden rush of figures streaming through the cage roused me from my introspection and I watched them intently. The technicians came in first. There were a thousand tasks that needed to be performed before an Evangelion could be launched, all in order and so quickly they may as well have been in unison.

I had learned to identify some of the procedures. All of three of us, all the Evas, were being unlimbered. There were a whole series of massive locks that encased my arms and shoulders and relieved the pressure on my joints, along with the buoyancy of the LCL. Most of them were removed in preparation for a launch. Were I to move, only the interlocking clamps on my pylons would need to be drawn back.

The other Evas received the most attention. They were to sortie, not me. The fittings on replacement armor plating were checked, the lenses on their eyes were power washed, and a dozen divers were flipping backwards into the LCL to check the other joints.

Ritsuko was among them, walking around in a wetsuit with a pair of goggles and a snorkel strapped around her head. Though she was a head shorter than most of the people she was ordering around, she gave orders expertly, in a commanding tone, her every gesture and posture pronouncing that she brooked no contradiction from her subordinates.

Wetsuits are not an especially alluring thing, contrary to what one might expect. The suit squashed her ample chest flat but outlined the rest of her languid curves. She was the subject of a few stolen glances, but only when her back was turned. I didn't steal a glance. I drank her in.

I had an excuse, after all. I don't blink.

The pilots came in about an hour after the prep work started, Ritsuko herself had emerged from the LCL bath, shivering, and was still dripping from her wetsuit when they passed. I felt a sudden stab of sympathy for Shinji. The plugsuits his copilots wore were, somewhat counterintuitively, even more bulky than Ritsuko's wetsuit, not the painted on layers they're always made out to be.

Even so, the poor boy had no idea where to rest his eyes. Closing my view in on the three of them, I could see him warring between the urge to stare at his copilots, only to forget himself and stare at Ritsuko instead.

Rei trailed behind the other two. Shinji and Asuka walked in lockstep, even swinging their arms in unison. Tiny as Asuka was she was even _taller_ than Shinji, perhaps by an inch or so. They didn't look at each other at all, at least not in the sense of eye contact. Asuka was glancing at him as much as he glanced at her, and both of them oblivious. Rei's flat expression changed slightly as she noticed something, but her thoughts never found voice.

The pilots split up. Shinji and Asuka went for their respective Evas. Rei came for me. I saw her climb the gantry next to my head, sit on the edge of the hatch, and swing in her legs. From there she was lost to me, hidden in the plug where I could not see.

As the hatch closed behind her, I noticed something. On my shoulder pylon, someone had scribbled a little shape, probably with a marker. It took me a moment to grasp the significance of a pair of wings and a halo. A kill marker.

I barely noticed when the plug slid into my neck. Synchronization was the same as before. The initial sensation was uncomfortably like gulping down a live insect, followed by the gentle merging of nervous systems. In a few seconds I could not see Rei, but I could feel her as clearly as my own arm, and so I didn't really need to.

I heard keystrokes. It was hard to focus anywhere with so much activity around me, capturing my attention. Ritsuko was in her office. When I saw her my heart skipped. Would have. Perhaps for convenience's sake, she'd closed the blinds and stripped out of her wetsuit right there, leaving it piled in a laundry bin by the office door.

She didn't have something inordinately sexy on underneath, just an unflattering one-piece bathing suit that covered her to her neck, but she was hurriedly typing and had a pen grasped in her mouth, and I could see her long pale legs stretched out in front of her. She rolled her head around in a tight circle, popping the tension from her neck, and plucked the pen from her teeth. Her hair was streaked red, still soaked in LCL.

"Don't get any ideas, buddy. I'm not putting on a show for you."

"I'm not saying anything," I said, still spooked by the tinny voice from the speaker.

"I'm patching you into the communications feeds so you can see what's going on up there. No exploring, okay?"

"Okay."

"Promise."

"You better mean it."

I meant it. The sudden profusion of inputs was jarring, shocking. I didn't tell her that I'd already found a way to watch Central Dogma. I had to pull back, let Rei take over and watch from within my mental sanctuary. With Unit Zero's being part of hers, I was just _there_.

The battle was a battle. There was half an hour of tedium as the Evas were deployed, one of the exceedingly rare times they would be sent up in a planned operation, not under threat of imminent attack.

They walked in giant strides up reinforced streets, marked with chevrons of reflective paint, special roads reinforced for an Eva to walk on. I had never noticed before. They split up and converged on the outskirts of the city, umbilicals trailing behind them like tails.

Staring back at them was the frozen shape of the twin angel, its two bodies frozen bent in the midst of some lascivious dance, locked in place when the bomb went off and maimed them. I could feel the crackle of their AT-Field, like feeling the static from a television screen in another room.

It started to move, sixteen minutes ahead of schedule.

I diverted my attention, and… I could see in the plugs. I saw Rei but I saw Shinji and Asuka, too. Rei watched intently, brow furrowed slightly, her body canted forward in the seat. The other two had their faces locked in grim determination as they approached, and at the right moment, began their tightly choreographed series of attacks.

It took less than a minute. Fifty-three seconds. They moved faster than something that size should be able to move, freely. It was poetic. Then there was a flash as the angel's death throes tripped them. I felt it die, felt the sudden _breaking_ I'd felt before. I saw it all happen in crystal clear detail.

The angel was dead. Asuka misplanted her foot, or the Eva's foot, rather, and it slid out from under her. Shinji moved, broke the sequence, and turned. He caught her and broke her fall but the momentum pulled him around. The Evas rolled, sparks flying wherever their armor touched, and landed in a tangled heap.

In the plug, her head snapped around. She must have been looking at him. "You _idiot_, you screwed it up!"

"I didn't!" Shinji protested.

They glared at each other, silently. Asuka folded her arms over her chest and turned away, chin lifting.

"What's with her?" Shinji mumbled, falling back into his seat.

The recovery operation took hours. The pilots had to roll the Evas onto the transport crawlers, and only then did they actually emerge from the plugs. By then, Rei had emerged from the entry plug and descended the stairs down to the walkway in front of me.

She walked to the center, and stared into my eye. Stood there for a minute, more, just staring. LCL was streaming out of her hair and running down her nose, but if she cared she didn't make it apparent. After a while her head cocked to the side, she stared for a few seconds more, and then turned and left.

It was four hours later when the pilots finally returned. The most expedient way to maneuver the Evas, of course, was to have the pilots do it, and so they brought them back into the cages. I was being locked down again, bolts attached to my arms and shoulders and back, my head tilted forward in repose.

Rei was already gone. The other two walked right in front of me, passing me by. Asuka strode angrily ahead of Shinji, who followed her like a lost puppy, unsure of where to go. Misato collected them and then they were gone.

Ritsuko came back, gathered some things, sighed at the camera, and left. A while later, I saw her face peering directly into the camera on her laptop. Her face filled my vision. She had her glasses on.

"Look at what you did to me," she said.

She picked up the laptop and cradled in her arms, facing away.

Her apartment was small. A living room, her bedroom and a spare, a small kitchen that was part of the living room. Washer and dryer in an alcove on the balcony, with lines to dry clothes drawn from her building to the next.

The living room was completely packed with boxes. The door to the spare bedroom was open. It was now mostly full of a big brass bed, a double at least, heaped up with pillows. Everything was pink and scarlet and pale cream satin, girly colors, but there were no dolls, no teddy bears, no toys or mementos, not even a picture in a frame.

She spun around. Asuka was sitting on Ritsuko's couch, feet up on Ritsuko's table, still in socks that were surprisingly dirty, the soles stained a pale brown. She was swaddled in oversized floppy pajamas and had a bag of some kind of crisps cradled in her lap, and was slowly nibbling them, one at a time, as she watched something on television. A soap opera, or whatever they would call such a thing here.

Her head snapped around, one of the crisps hanging from her lips. She drew it in and chewed it up without touching it with her hands, crunched it, and swallowed.

"Who are you talking to? Is it your _boyfriend?"_

Ritsuko closed the laptop. The camera was still on. I could hear.

"What boyfriend?" Ritsuko said, blithely.

"_Misato_ said you have one."

"Did she now," said Ritsuko. I could hear movement. Heading into the kitchen?

"Yeah," said Asuka. "She said you're blushing all the time and you won't tell anybody who you're talking to. You totally have a boyfriend."

Ritsuko didn't answer her.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

* * *

Rei studiously ignored everyone as she swam laps in the pool, back and forth, back and forth. At each turn she would slap the rim of the pool before folding her legs against the side and pushing out to scissor through the water. In the water she was as graceful as a bird, and quick.

Shinji sat on a chaise lounge desperately trying not to look at her while he worked at his computer. It was then that Asuka emerged, walking towards the pool in her bare feet.

Ritsuko told me that morning that Asuka pitched a fit when she was not permitted to wear the red-and-white striped suit she drew out of her wardrobe, and was forced instead to wear a more conservative number. In truth, I heard part of the argument through the camera.

It was left on the night before, as usual. Ritsuko wore a long t-shirt to bed that hung around her knees. As usual she formed her blankets up to a ball and slept facing the camera. When she woke up that morning she slid out of the bed and yawned and the shirt had rode up all the way to her hips and only fell back down to her knees when she stood up, closed the laptop, and carried it into the kitchen.

That was how I could hear the argument. Asuka's voice was crisp, tense, wavering as she tried to find the right tone to talk to Ritsuko- not so familiar as she would take with Misato, but they had been together for two weeks, trying to balance between the extremes of the imperious contempt she showed those she thought beneath her with the buttery sweet tones she'd take up with a superior.

"I'm not letting you wear that in pubic," said Ritsuko.

"I won't be wearing it in public. I'll be wearing it at the pool."

"You shouldn't even have that. Where did you get that thing?"

"I bought it," Asuka snapped.

"Oh," said Ritsuko. "Trying to impress someone, are we?"

After that, silence reigned. Asuka must have chosen the more demure swimsuit she wore now.

Standing over Shinji, she arched her back and puffed out her chest and threw her shoulders back, hands on her hips. She threw loose hair over her shoulder with an exaggerated motion of her arm and leaned over his computer, resting her arm casually on the back of his lounger.

Her hair spilled down and swept over his shoulder, and he finally looked up, sinking into the seat.

"What are you doing?"

"Working on a problem."

"You're doing schoolwork? Here, let me see."

She took the computer from him, without waiting for his reply, and looked over the screen.

"Oh, this is so _simple_. Here."

She did something I couldn't see. Rei continued knifing through the water, ignoring them both. Shinji watched the screen. Asuka twisted as she leaned over and propped the computer on the arms of the lounger, squeezing her arms together.

"It's a thermal expansion problem. Do you know what thermal expansion is?"

"No," sid Shinji.

"We're you paying attention? It's simple. When things get hot, they get bigger."

She stood up, leaving him to snatch the computer lest it fall. She began rubbing her hands on her chest.

"If I rubbed my breasts, do you think they'd get bigger, or smaller?"

Shinji stared at her wide-eyed, shoved the computer back in his lap, and drew his legs up, curling into a ball. Asuka stared at him for a moment as he peered at her with oversized eyes and very carefully held the computer on his lap.

"You're boring," she declared, and walked off.

A while later Shinji had given up on his schoolwork but still had his computer perched on his lap. Rei sat on the edge of the pool facing away from, feet dangling in the water and her unearthly cerulean hair clinging to her neck. She paid him no mind as she sat catching her breath, her tiny frame expanding slightly with each gasp of air.

Asuka came from off camera, dragging a scuba tank, flippers, mask, and snorkel. She struggled to get the gear over to the edge of the pool. She put on the flippers, then the mask, then the snorkel. Finally she crouched and awkwardly did up the straps on the tank and stood up shakily, her eyes flying open wide when her flippered foot slid on the slippery concrete and she nearly lost her balance.

"Hey, Shinji!"

He looked at her.

"Look at me!"

She bit down on the mask, tested her air, and pitched backwards into the water with a loud splash. Once in she was a tad more graceful and managed to turn over and swim out into the pool in an exaggerated motion. As Shinji watched her, Rei got up and walked out of the gymnasium, disappearing from view.

Ritsuko cleared her throat. She was sitting in the office. She held up a printout to the camera. It looked like an ultrasound, but I knew what it was at once.

"Sandalphon," I said. "Number eight."

"What do I do about it? I mean, in the, ah, show."

"Attempt to capture it in a magnetic cage."

"Capture it, how?"

"Rigging up an Eva in some kind of diving suit and lowering it into the volcano. I think it has to be Unit Two."

"Right," she said, "The D-Type equipment is only compatible with Two," she said, absently. "What do you think? Is that a bad idea?"

"It worked before," I said. "The only snag was that the cable bringing Unit Two out of the volcano broke. Shinji had to dive in to rescue her."

Ritsuko blinked. "He did that?"

"Yes."

She bit her lip. "Now I see what you meant about changing things. It's that's supposed to happen-"

"You can't risk it. A small change, and either or them could be lost, or both. We can't let that happen."

"No," she sighed. "I'll reinforce the cable," she drummed her fingers on the desk. "I need Misato's approval. I should go talk to her and the kids, make sure they're on board for this."

She nodded at the camera, and got up. "I'll be in touch. Is there anything else we need to know?"

"The angel will attack. The cage doesn't hold it. Asuka kills it by exposing it to the coolant."

"I see," said Ritsuko. I could all but see the wheels turning in her head. "I'll work on that, too."

She left the office, carrying some papers. I turned my attention elsewhere. All of my maintenance had been done, so Unit Zero was simply standing there while work was performed on the other Evas. Unit One's helmet was partially disassembled and similar work was going on with Unit Two.

I watched the people bustling around the cages. They looked so foreign to me now, so strange. I was beginning to forget what it was like to walk on my own, to move and breathe freely. Sometimes I almost forgot I was in pain.

Drawing back even more, I retreated into my mind. I'd found that I could put myself into an almost-sleep if I simply stopped paying attention to things. I slid out of my chair within my mental landscape and laid out on the carpet, focusing on the feeling of the fibers scratching my skin.

Lying quietly came easy. It startled me when I heard Ritsuko's voice.

"We're doing it," she said.

It took me a moment to respond. I felt sluggish. "What do I need to do?"

"Nothing. You'll be here on standby, with Rei, if the city is attacked while we're conducting the field operation. We leave tomorrow. I'm afraid it's going to be a little lonely here for a while."

"I"ll manage."

In truth, it was always a little lonely. She did her work for the rest of the day, and I watched her. Towards the end she started packing things. Her office was a mess but she laid things out before she put them in her bags, mumbling a mental checklist softly to herself as she worked. Watching her was more relaxing than simply lying there.

"Will you be alright while I'm gone?" she said, looking up.

"It's not like you can take me with you."

She sighed.

"I'll be fine," I said.

Back to my not-sleep. I tried to remember what real sleep was like and only frustrated myself. As I drew up inside Unit Zero and went into a deeper trance, I let myself drift. There were currents in my mind, little tugs that kept trying to draw my attention.

I began to wonder what happened to me. I felt like I was physically sucked through the door before I came here, but was I? What if that was all an elaborate vision and I simply passed out on the floor in the basement, like John Carter of Mars?

If I opened the door once, could I do it again?

Aramisael loomed large in my mind. Every minute I waited here was another minute closer. Was there another way to defeat the angel? If so, then what? When Third Impact came, what would become of me? I told Kaji I had an ace in the hole, and I meant it. There was a possibility, but it was so drastic that it frightened me.

Gazing across the gap between us, I looked at Yui, the great silent gargoyle that stared back at me day in and day out, black eye lenses fixed on nothing. I knew she was in there and I knew her plan called for Third Impact.

I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't let them die.

Yet there was something worse. I was stuck in here. Yui was absorbed, her body taken. She could, in theory, come back out. There didn't seem to be a time limit on it. Shinji was in there for a month, and he was fine. Kyoko I didn't know about. Her body survived her contact with the Eva, died later.

I never had a body. At least, not here.

The lights in the cages shut off. They died with heavy, rhythmic thumps. That night was quiet. Ritsuko went home, put her laptop on the table in her bedroom. She packed a change of clothes in an overnight bag from her closet, humming softly to herself. I could hear Asuka watching television in the other room.

When Ritsuko went into the living room, Asuka turned the television down.

"What are you doing?" said Asuka.

"Watching television," Ritsuko yawned. "I do have a television."

The volume didn't go back up.

"What?" said Ritsuko.

"Nothing," said Asuka.

"You look like you were about to say something."

Asuka didn't answer her. Eventually the volume went back up. I heard domestic sounds. Footsteps, a microwave running and ringing when it finished. Later on the television shut off, and I heard a door close. Ritsuko came in, pulled back her bed covers. She glanced at the camera and turned around before she shimmied out of her pants, exposing her long pale legs.

She slept fitfully and woke before the alarm, set to five in the morning. She yawned when she woke, leaned over-bleary eye, and slapped the alarm into quiet.

"I hate it when I do that," she yawned, "I wake up and then the alarm makes me feel sleepy."

She stepped out of view of the camera. Her shirt landed on the bed, followed a moment later by some white fabric that I only recognized after she disappeared into the apartment. She came back, and when she stepped into view she was buttoning a white blouse and looking in her mirror. Then she left again.

"Asuka?"

"Wha?"

"It's time to get up. We have to go."

"I don't wanna go."

"Wake up," Ritsuko said, a little louder. "Come on, we have to get going."

"Oh," Asuka yawned. "Right. Can I sleep in the car?"

"Yes," Ritsuko sighed.

She came back in, found a pair of slacks, bent and pulled them on. She glanced at the camera and her lip curled in a smirk and as she was bent over she arched her back and then stood up slowly, pulling them as she went before she yanked them up over her hips and backside and buttoned the front.

She yawned again, and closed the computer. I heard a back being zipped around it, and muffled sounds.

Asuka's voice sounded drawn out, like she was twitching her jaws trying not to yawn. "I'm ready."

"No shower?"

"I'll take one after the mission. The LCL gets in my hair."

"I know," Ritsuko sighed. "It's like chewing gum if you let it dry. Are you nervous?"

They were walking. I heard the apartment door close and lock.

"Why would I be nervous?"

"It's dangerous," she said, "What you're doing today."

"I know," said Asuka. "It's always dangerous."

"I suppose," said Ritsuko. "What were you going to ask me last night?"

"Huh? Oh. I don't know."

They got in Ritsuko's car. The bag with the computer in it was probably in the back seat. In ten minutes, Asuka was snoring. Ritsuko hummed to herself for a while, then turned on the radio, tuning it to some poppy music, turned down low.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

* * *

In my supreme selfishness I thought: It had to be Unit Zero, didn't it?

I couldn't be one of the hero Evas. I couldn't be the one pulling Asuka out of the fire. Literally. I couldn't be the one charging into battle. I had to stand here, frozen, able to breathe but _barely_, drifting in a stupor while events I had no control over happened miles away.

All I could think of was the cable snapping at a different place, or too early or too late, of Shinji slipping or his grab missing the mark and Asuka drifting to her death in the volcano or both of them and it would be my fault solely for _being here_.

No longer could I reasonably deny Ritsuko information about angel attacks. Yet so many of them were such close run things. However the connection worked between her laptop and my mind, it broke during her drive with Asuka to the remote launch site, and though I searched I did not find. Here I was alone.

Mostly alone.

Kaji came in a few hours after the operation was set to start. He sat at Ritsuko's desk, picked up Ritsuko's cup and sniffed Ritsuko's coffee.

"What do you want?"

"Old spy trick," he said. "Annoy you into starting the conversation. Puts me on better footing."

"I see. What do you want?"

He smirked. "I thought we were partners. I've done some digging, reported some findings about Seele to Gendo, some findings about Ikari to Seele, some findings about both to the UN. Seele and Gendo don't give a fig what the UN is doing, so less paperwork for me."

"You're still helping them?"

"What choice do I have? If I should suddenly clam up, how would that look? Seele might wonder why they bother keeping me here and Ikari would get suspicious immediately. I've been feeding them information they already know, anyway. It's the government of Japan that's breathing down my neck."

"They're useless to us. Anything you report to them you may as well be reporting to the others."

"I do have some information. Gendo will be leaving soon. Nerv is recovering some kind of object from the Antarctic wasteland. Ideas?"

"The Lance of Longinus."

"That would be…?"

"It's a device fashioned by the same aliens that created Adam. It can shut down a seed of life. It also makes an effective weapon against AT-Fields."

"It can pierce them?"

"Yes. The Lance appears to be a lifeform of its own."

"You know this how, exactly?"

"Because in a few weeks, I'm going to use it to kill a spaceborne Angel. Or I'm supposed to, at least. That may change."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd let me in your plans a little bit. You keep mentioning this ace in the hole."

"I know what Gendo wants."

Kaji sat back. "So you mean to extort him?"

"No. I mean to give it to him, freely, if it comes to that."

Kaji rocked in the chair. "Suppose he doesn't want to cooperate with you, even if you can give him what he wants."

"I'll deal with him."

Kaji blinked. "I see."

"It's not him I'm worried about."

"Then who?" he said.

"His wife," I said. "I need to be sure. I need you to find information on her for me. I need to know what I'm doing."

"Ikari's wife is dead," said Kaji. He blinked. "Wait, you said she's alive somehow in the Eva. Like you."

"Yes. Like me. Or not like me. I know for sure she's in there. How aware or independent is, I don't."

He blinked, and stared at the camera. I felt a tug at my mind. I turned my attention to see Ritsuko staring into the camera. She was hunched over her laptop. She was sitting in her car, alone. She was slick with sweat and she looked tired.

"Chuck," she whispered.

"Are you okay? What happened?"

She sighed. "The cable broke. It couldn't handle the strain."

I tensed. "The pilots?"

"They're both fine. Shinji pulled them out. I never would have believed it if I didn't see it myself."

"Then what's wrong?"

"Nothing," she sighed, breathing sharply. "Everything. We did it. We captured the angel."

Oh.

Whoops.

"Chuck?"

"That's great," I said. "I think. Is it?"

"There's so much we can learn from it," she said. "They're going to prep it to be moved over to the Matsushiro facility. I've been on the phone with the Commander there. They're going to pull the experimental S2 from Unit Four and and move it and Unit Three to Matsushiro ahead of schedule. They'll be kept on standby if it goes active and we have to kill it."

She was breathless, flushed with excitement. Her soft features folded into a genuine grin. I just stared at her for a second.

"I have to get back to the mobile command before I'm missed. I'll see you in a few hours, okay?"

I would have nodded. I hope no one noticed Unit Zero's head bobbing slightly. "Okay."

"What?" said Kaji. "What is it?"

"They captured the Angel."

"Is that good?"

"Fuck no, now I don't know what's going to happen. It's already started causing huge changes."

"You should still have good intel, though, right?"

"Lots, but now the specifics of the battles will be up in the air."

"You still know the capabilities of the enemy. That's a start."

"Yes. I have a job for you."

His eyebrow twitched. "And what would that be?"

"I want you to spend some time with Shinji."

"Excuse me?"

"Guy stuff. Bonding. Taking him… I don't know, shooting or to a strip bar or something."

He sighed. "Maybe something a little less mature."

"Whatever. Just get him comfortable around you. I don't have any sources of information on him. See if you can get Misato to join you."

"She won't," he said.

"Not yet."

That made his eye twitch, but his face remained calm, the same dismissive grin on his lips. He'd have made an able poker player. He nodded, a tight, subtle movement, and stood up. He locked the door behind him.

Ritsuko came back hours later. She was practically glowing. She flounced into the chair and grinned.

"I can't believe it. It really worked."

"What are you going to do with it?"

She shrugged. "Everything. It has an intact core, for a start. The Evas could all be upgraded with viable S2 engines. No more umbilicals."

"About that."

"Yes?"

"Things have changed. The angel was supposed to die. Unit Four is supposed to go missing when its S2 screws up."

She leaned her chin on her hand. "Go missing?"

"Vanish. Apparently an AT-Field can create some kind of theoretical space. One of the angels can do that, too. The twelfth."

"I never considered that. Do you know where it went?"

"It all happens off screen."

"Was there ever a problem with Unit Three?"

I was quiet for a moment. "Yes."

"What kind of problem?"

"After Four went missing, Three was sent here for testing. During transport it was infected by Bardiel, the thirteenth angel."

"Infected?" she said. "It's some sort of a parasite?"

"Yes. It took over the Eva."

"Then what?"

"Shinji didn't want to hurt the pilot, so he refused to fight. The Dummy System was activated instead. It ripped Unit Three apart. The pilot loses his leg."

"Well," said Ritsuko. "That won't happen now. I'll put in protocols to check the Eva for contamination before we even activate it."

"Do you know who the pilots will be?"

She leaned forward and typed something, holding her pencil in her mouth. "Let me check. Here it is."

"Well?"

"The next viable candidates on the list are Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida."

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

"The Aida one. Switch him out. Can you do that?"

"Sure. I made up the list. The next candidate is almost on par with him. It's a girl. Hikari Horaki. Does that name ring a bell?"

"Yes. I think she'll be great. Perfect. I hope I'm right."

Ritsuko sighed, and stuck her pencil back in her pocket. "I'm so excited I can barely stand it. I wish I could take you to get a drink with… me…" she trailed off.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"So am I."

"Who are you talking to?"

Ritsuko spun around. Misato was leaning in the door.

"Who?" said Ritsuko.

"You. Who were you talking to?"

"I wasn't talking to anybody," said Ritsuko.

Misato eyed her. "I heard you."

She strutted into the room, arms folded. "What is that?"

Staring straight into the camera, she shouldered Ritsuko to the side.

"A webcam? You _are_ talking to somebody. Who is it?"

"None of your business," Ritsuko said, sharply. "I have a mountain of paperwork to do. Do you mind?"

"Yes, I mind. You're blushing!"

Ritsuko's blush deepened. "I am not. Don't be ridiculous. Relations between men and women are-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Misato, "I've heard this all before. Who is he?"

"Misato," Ritsuko said, angrily.

"Ritsuko has a boyfriend!" Misato chanted. "Ritsuko has a boyfriend!"

"I do not!" Ritsuko almost shouted.

Misato pointed at the webcam. "Have you put on a show for him yet? A little _striptease?"_

Ritsuko glanced at the camera. Her mouth clicked shut, and she stood up.

"Misato," she said, sharply, grabbing the other woman's arm. "You have to keep quiet about this. _Please._"

Misato's face went from a mask of mirth to a wide-eyed look of confusion. "What? Why?"

"I can't explain, I-"

"Tell her," I said.

They both looked at the screen.

"I knew it," said Misato. "A video chat. How did you hide the window?"

Ritsuko rushed to the other side of the lab and closed the door, locked it, and slid a chair under it for good measure. She jog-walked back to the computer and looked out the window.

"Are you sure about this?" said Ritsuko.

"I am," I said.

"About what?" said Misato.

"Show her," said Ritsuko. "The cage is clear."

She nodded at the window. Misato walked over, looking at her askance. She looked out the window.

I turned my head.

"Hello, Misato."


End file.
